In tonight’s musical selection English satirist Noel Coward sings, with lilting, caustic nonchalance, that There Are Bad Times Just Around The Corner.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.
In tonight’s musical selection English satirist Noel Coward sings, with lilting, caustic nonchalance, that There Are Bad Times Just Around The Corner.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.
“Young men are voting for women…”
Afghan woman Fawzia Koofi was the subject of a story in Saturday’s Globe and Mail. Long before her interview with the G&M she spoke to Terry Glavin at her home in Kabul:
“I don’t think there is an ‘Afghan war’,” she said. “There is a global war.”
“We have lots of unfinished problems with Pakistan. Even Iran is appeasing the Taliban – they don’t support the Taliban but they support Hamas. Also there are political games going on in your countries, and these games influence what happens in Afghanistan as well.”
“There is a lack of proper communication in your country about Afghanistan. They don’t see all the good progresses. For me, the hope is for the younger generation. Young men are voting for women. The society is under a big transformation, and there are people who don’t want to see this.
“In Canada, the people don’t see this…”
Blogger Travis Corcoran of TJIC.com, wrote a fairly edgy post last week regarding the shooting in Tuscon, containing comments such as:
“It is absolutely, absolutely unacceptable to shoot indiscriminately. Target only politicians and their staff and leave regular citizens alone.”
As a result of this post, he was paid a visit by the local authorities and told if, as a “show of good faith” he voluntarily surrendered his firearms,
his License to Carry would not be affected, as soon as he complied, his LTC was “suspended”.
Read more here and here
SDH I left that tip a few days ago. Here is a screen shot of the offending post.
http://www.heronforge.net/images/heavy-ink.jpg
“The Equal Treatment Commission (in Holland) has ruled that schools have a say in the way in which students wear headscarves.
“The commission was responding to the case of the Gerrit Rietveld College in the city of Utrecht, where 50 students objected to a new dress code. This only allows Muslim girls to cover their heads as long as 90 percent of the face remains visible. Headgear which covers the chin or eyebrows, for example, is regarded as hindering communication between student and teacher.
“The commission has backed the college and says the question of communication is of sufficient importance. It also noted that the code applies to everyone. Hairstyles which cover the eyes are also banned.”
SDH, Travis Corcoran is a full-blown idiot at best.
So is the first blogger you linked to, “No One of Any Import”, (an apt nick) who wrote:
“Now (TJIC’s) website is inaccessible. (For how long?) Not only that, but his license to carry a firearm has been suspended. Is it just me, or are things getting just a little creepy lately?”
Well, yeah, things *are* a little creepier than they were the moment before I read it.
How *dense* can be people be? I mean, is there a limit, theoretically?
Posted by John Hinderaker at Power Line:
http://www.powerlineblog.com/
“Why Is Congress Requiring Poison Light Bulbs?
“Isn’t it perverse that Congress is requiring the abolition of perfectly good incandescent light bulbs, and their replacement by fluorescent lights that contain mercury, one of the deadliest substances known to mankind? (Mercury, as you likely know, is what made hatters mad.) How does requiring the introduction of poison into every home in the United States improve the environment, the stated purpose of the legislation?
“Every now and then, of course, one of the new compact fluorescent light bulbs will break. Via the Heritage Foundation, here are the Environmental Protection Agency’s instructions for how to clean up the toxic products that the government is forcing you to buy”:
[The following are the instructions.]
Before Cleanup
* Have people and pets leave the room, and avoid the breakage area on the way out.
* Open a window or door to the outdoors and leave the room for 5‐10 minutes.
* Shut off the central forced‐air heating/air conditioning (H&AC) system, if you have one.
* Collect materials you will need to clean up the broken bulb:
o Stiff paper or cardboard
o Sticky tape (e.g., duct tape)
o Damp paper towels or disposable wet wipes (for hard surfaces)
o Glass jar with a metal lid (such as a canning jar) or a sealable plastic bag(s)
“Got that? Now you are ready to start cleaning up the toxic substances you didn’t want in your house in the first place.”
And there’s much more . . .
Seeing as the language processing skills of the upcoming generation are rapidly deteriorating, I guess we’re going to have a whole lot more “mad hatters”.
Good Lord, deliver us.
EBD,
I am not sure your point, sure the guy might have been an idiot and made a poor joke along the lines of Q:”what do you call 1000 Lawyers at the bottom of the sea” A: “A good start”.
But that is no reason to suspend someone’s 1st and 2nd amendment rights. When someone makes a lawyer joke, police do not go out and take some ones guns, rights and send an all points alert to the Bar association letting them know that this implied threat was issued.
Once upon a time one had to actually DO something illegal, not just be humour impaired.
The Grey Lady – I respectfully disagree. It’s all context. And that’s a creepy statement to make by that guy.
“Humour-impaired” is the kindest possible thing you can say about the guy, Grey Lady. He wrote that it’s unacceptable to shoot people indiscriminately, and suggested “Target only politicians and their staff.”
The post was titled “1 down, 434 to go.”
If he was joking – and I assume he was – then he’s just *dumb.* The first rule of comedy, after all, is timing.
I have no opinion on whether or not the authorities should have paid him a visit; I just find it amazing that anyone would be *shocked* or offended that they did.
Ah well, Hopefully dude will find a deep vein of edgy humour in his visit with the authorities.
Lookout (11:19), that’s actually quite disturbing. It sounds like dystopian fiction, except…it isn’t.
Gah.
Yup, EBD, and, as I’ve said, there’s much more from the Environmental Protection (sic) Agency (EPA) over at Power Line.
Let’s remember too that the EPA is one of Obama’s pets, and that his approval ratings have gone up. (Are people really that stupid? Rhetorical question. Yes, they are.)
We are definitely living in really CRAZY, scary times. (In the history of the world, this is normal, I guess.)
Here’s the latest appearance of Dennis Miller on the O’Reilly Factor.
http://www.investigativeproject.org/2506/gov-christie-strange-relationship-with-radical
Gov Christie seems to have a few islamist skeletons rattling around in his closet?
Looks like Obama isn’t the only one getting rid of the nonsensical “green initiatives”!
Did anyone else catch this article on the CBC News site?
I have no particular problems with it until the end:
“Abdullahi Mohamed said he fears that unless the federal government reaches out to young Muslims there will be more young men from Canada joining al-Shabaab.
“Help us before they use us. Employ us before they employ us. The ball is in your court federal government. Wake up before the blood is soaked in the streets of Toronto, like it was in London, Stockholm and New York.” ”
This “reaching out” crap is pure nonsense. In Canada they’re living in Heaven compared to many other places they could have grown up in.
One bright sign is that even on the extremely left-wing CBC News site, this is the top-rated comment:
“Last time I checked, treason was still a crime. Anyone who is recruiting for this group, and anyone who joins this group, should be stripped of their citizenship, their assets, and imprisoned for life with no parole for 40 years, and get dangerous offender status.”
People v. numbers
We can put a face on it now: “Anna Yablonskaya,” a prominent and rising young playwright, lyrical poet, essayist and journalist from Ukraine, was among the dead (and maimed) at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport.
http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/
People,you got to listen. There isn’t just an elephant in the room that we are tiptoeing around,it is a fricking herd of them.
The crap going down in Eygpt,Tunasia,Nigeria,and basically the whole of Africa,and the middle east has one common denominator,the “religion of peace”.
The sooner we wake up to the obvious fact and do whatever is necessary to stop the spread of this vermin,the better.The women and children of islam need us.The men(men?) of islam should be castrated by their women.They,the women,are the only hope.
Sorry folks if that offends you,but from my armchair,there is not much else you do with bugs.The bad moon has arisen,and bowing to it just makes you an easier target
Robert W.,I went to the cbc site,and was pleasantly surprised by the comments. Most were horrified by our kids joining the enemy,and the general gist of it was that they were not Canadians,and should be deported.
I left a comment,brought up Omar Khadr,I’ll bet it won’t be put up. Cheers.
New York State Senators trying to ban people from using cell phones or electronic devices while being on a public street.
http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?section=news%2Flocal%2Fnew_york&id=7918622
Quebec is trying to blackmail us again. I say we kick ’em out. Or take ourselves out.
Louise,I agree,but wow,we can’t even reform the small parasite known as the Senate,imagine the trouble it would be to tear that ‘distinct’ leech off our backside,and away from our wallets.
The bloq may be jumping the shark with their demand for another $5B to Quebec. Harper has been pushing the Bloq into a corner. Now they will come out with desperate demands like this. Harper will properly ignore them. Will Ignatief? This is a chess game folks.
http://www.jpost.com/NationalNews/Article.aspx?id=205401
Worth a read
“What a waste, I’m 46 years old and I’m being murdered”
EBD, Erik – Corcoran and the No Import guy seem creepy, but nobody would reasonably assume that they were posting death threats; well, hell, maybe some official would, but why should Corcoran’s constitutional rights rest on some bureaucrat’s sense of humour? Tone is overrated.
Palin’s take on Oblmeya’s SOTU spectacle.
O’s theme of “winning the future” Has palin saying , …ok , ‘there were a lot of “WTF” moments in that speech’.
Heh.
“WTF” Moments ,,,might even beat death panels for lefty head explosions.
The clip is an interview with Greta that I thought was tougher than the interview with Mitt Romney on Hanity. (check out FOX news online and hit the politics button for the Romney interview)
Greta gets her to answer some tough questions on the economy, entitlements, and she gives her policy solutions,with candor
She also responds to divisive reports in the GOP.
http://video.foxnews.com/#/v/4512578/sarah-palin-takes-on-/?playlist_id=87485
(I think her interview is more in depth than the one with Romney,,,but that’s just my take)
Palin’s take on Oblmeya’s SOTU spectacle.
O’s theme of “winning the future” Has palin saying , …ok , ‘there were a lot of “WTF” moments in that speech’.
Heh.
“WTF” Moments ,,,might even beat death panels for lefty head explosions.
The clip is an interview with Greta that I thought was tougher than the interview with Mitt Romney on Hanity. (check out FOX news “on_line” and hit the politics button for the Romney interview)
Greta gets her to answer some tough questions on the economy, entitlements, and she gives her policy solutions,with candor
She also responds to divisive reports in the GOP.
http://video.foxnews.com/#/v/4512578/sarah-palin-takes-on-/?playlist_id=87485
(I think her interview is more in depth than the one with Romney,,,but that’s just my take)
PS see if this beats the spam filter.
YAY I beat the spam filter!(for once)
“The move is just the latest in Yad Vashem’s digital outreach. Earlier this week, the memorial launched a version of its YouTube channel in Farsi to educate the country’s most bitter enemy — Iran — about the Nazi genocide of 6 million Jews.”
“Yad Vashem, Google team up to put Shoah data online”
“Project will make Holocaust photos and documents available on Internet; first batch already hits web; viewers can add their stories.”
“The world’s largest collection of Holocaust documents is going digital.”
“Israel’s Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, is teaming up with Google to make its photographs and documents interactive and searchable on the Internet. The first 130,000 photos hit the web Wednesday.
Although much of Yad Vashem’s archive was already available through its formidable website, the new project enables users to search keywords and data just like a Google search.
A social network-like component allows viewers to contribute to the project by adding their own stories, comments and documents about family members who appear in the online archives.
Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev said even though that feature could be misused to post anti-Semitic comments, the risk is outweighed by the benefit provided to future generations seeking information about their ancestors.”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2663829/posts
No one does it better than Noel Coward! I knew most of his songs by heart by the time I was nine! He was my grandmother’s favourite, along with Bing and, another fine singer, Jane Froman.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oYYg4Xwd3A
Can’t resist just one more Jane Froman clip from ’50s TV, General Electric Lamps Presents: It’s a Most Unusual Day …
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q58tCX60d7E&feature=related
AGW Progress Report.
“*actually advancing”.
…-
“Another Alberta roof collapses from snow”
“EDMONTON – Fire officials are warning businesses with flat-top roofs to remove the snow and ice after the latest roof collapse.”
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2011/01/26/17049151.html
…-
“*actually advancing”:
“Himalayan glaciers not melting because of climate change, report finds”
“Himalayan glaciers are actually advancing rather than retreating, claims the first major study since a controversial UN report said they would be melted within quarter of a century.”
“Researchers have discovered that contrary to popular belief half of the ice flows in the Karakoram range of the mountains are actually growing rather than shrinking.
The discovery adds a new twist to the row over whether global warming is causing the world’s highest mountain range to lose its ice cover.
It further challenges claims made in a 2007 report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that the glaciers would be gone by 2035.
Although the head of the panel Dr Rajendra Pachauri later admitted the claim was an error gleaned from unchecked research, he maintained that global warming was melting the glaciers at “a rapid rate”, threatening floods throughout north India.
The new study by scientists at the Universities of California and Potsdam has found that half of the glaciers in the Karakoram range, in the northwestern Himlaya, are in fact advancing and that global warming is not the deciding factor in whether a glacier survives or melts.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/8284223/Himalayan-glaciers-not-melting-because-of-climate-change-report-finds.html
Thanks Black Mamba for understanding the PRINCIBLE at issue here. :O)
Erik and EBD
Rights are rights regardless of context. This man has NOT been arrested or held for a single thing.
Let’s ignore for the moment how many people were investigated for making similar comments about George W. Bush. Let’s look at the “logic” being exercised by the Arlington Po-Po, shall we?
They claim that Corcoran is so dangerous that, while he has done nothing more than put up a blog post, he must be restrained from possessing firearms. However, it appears that it’s not worth it for the police to follow him, or stake out his place, or arrest him.
Huh?
Look, guys, if you think that his speech rises to the level of an actual threat of specific harm to specific persons, he should be in jail. If you’re not sure, then do the leg work to establish whether it is or not.
So, what do we know about the Arlington Police Department? We know that they’re lazy – nobody assigned to watch over this “dangerous” suspect. We know that they’re biased – Arlington is a hotbed of George W. Bush hatred, and the last decade would offer a wealth of examples of similar or worse speech, none of which was investigated.
And we know that they’re idiots. It’s not like there isn’t a ton of case law on how the First Amendment applies to threats of political violence. Arlington will lose this, if it ever gets to trial. Post Heller and McDonald, they’ll lose even worse.
http://borepatch.blogspot.com/2011/01/i-am-tjic.html
There is no sliding scale of rights based on someone’s funny bone and anyone who argues that measure as an acceptable stick is asking for their own rights to be swept up into the toilet based on nothing more then some petty bureaucratic whim.
Dueling cellos hammer out an entertaining redition of Micheal Jackson’s Smooth Criminal. Enjoy!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlVbEclPj4c&feature=player_embedded
Canada land of the Citizenship of Convenience
http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories/20110127/harper-in-morocc-110127/
Harper says former Tunisian President ‘Not Welcome’
There are concerns Ben Ali could try to come to Canada where his billionaire brother-in-law, Belhassen Trabelsi, is reportedly staying at a hotel just outside of Montreal. Trabelsi, who is believed to have fled to Canada last week, is also accused of stealing Tunisian government assets prior to the regime’s overthrow.
*Canada’s Immigration Minister Jason Kenney pointed out, however, that Trabelsi is a permanent resident of Canada and authorities could only move to extradite him if a direct request was issued from Tunisia.
More….
“The CRTC has decided to allow Bell and other big telecom companies to change the way Canadians are billed for Internet access. Metering, or usage-based billing (UBB), will mean that service providers can charge per byte in addition to their basic access charges.”
Full story here
I think this is very bad news. If there was real competition then I wouldn’t have any right to complain but ISPs in Canada have essentially become an oligopoly, so I think we do have the right to complain!
European carbon market frozen indefinitely
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jan/27/european-commission-carbon-market
Meanwhile: Canada won’t jump into cap-and-trade carbon market on its own: Kent
http://ipolitics.ca/2011/01/26/canada-wont-jump-into-cap-and-trade-carbon-market-on-its-own-kent/
Not all is well in Egypt these days.
AGW PR Update:
Lookin’ good.
…-
“Roofs Collapsing under Tons of Snow in New England”
“The most recent storm that dropped from 8 to 18 inches of snow on southern New England added more weight to the existing snow cover, leading to multiple roof failures.”
“Volcanic Ash Scrubs Indonesia Flights”
“Carriers Jetstar and Virgin Blue, out of Australia, along with Singapore Airlines, cancelled or diverted flights to Denpasar, on the popular tourist destination of Bali, Thursday.”
“NYC Crushed with Record Snow”
“A fast-moving storm created quite a snowy mess from Boston to D.C., dumping record snow in New York City and Philadelphia. Mary Yoon has the story.”
http://www.accuweather.com/
Liberal Iggy’s O’Harvard buddy: Update.
“The Obama administration probably ended at the beginning of 2011.”
…-
“Dustbins I Have Known”
“A friend in Egypt sent the following assessment of the situation there yesterday:
1. Most commentators tend to make it [the unrest in Egypt] a ‘western oriented strongman’ v. Islamist thing, whereas the Islamists are already very well placed within this regime, including the military and the security services.
2. Recent Pew poll shows one-in-five Egyptians support Al Quaeda. Egyptians I spoke to thought this as understatement.
3. The MB [Muslim Brotherhood] seems certain to emerge on top at some point, only question is when. That will give them state-resources for their sophisticated agitprop and penetration efforts in the West.
There is a possibility that if Mubarak falls, it will have an effect analogous to the collapse of the Shah during Jimmy Carter’s Presidency. The same friend with Egyptian connections noted that very extreme poverty depicted in the “Happyland” post could be found in Egypt. He sent a link to pictures, showing garbage scavengers in Egypt, called the zabaleen, who consist almost exclusively of Coptic Christians. They have traditionally used pigs to recycle trash. But these porcine aides have been outlawed by the Mubarak government.
This governmental decision poses a major setback to the Zabbaleen because pigs are an essential component to their recycling and sorting system, in which the pigs eat all of the organic waste. Immediately after the culling of pigs, observers have noticed a visible increase of trash piles and piles of rotting food on the streets of Cairo.
That Egyptian government’s decision to clamp down on scavengers should lead to rotting piles of garbage should be no surprise. I remember Marcos era efforts to ban garbage scavengers for cosmetic reasons resulting in the same thing. One thing the scavengers knew that the leaders in their palaces didn’t was that garbage could not be wished away. But you could, with some effort, make something out of it.
The idea was alien to the dictators. The rot, you see, was not in the heaps but elsewhere; less in the scavangers than in the heart of the dictatorial system. Failing systems are sumps of bad ideas, which have for a long time been subsisting on rent-taking and cronyism. Regimes which are about to fall can never get rid of all the toxic ideas circulating in its memory space, like a bad operating system that is full of memory leaks and dysfunctional background processes. At some point you either reboot or face the Blue Screen of Death.
Until then such regimes are happy to occupy themselves with irrelevant trivia. The Egyptians were determined to get rid of the Nilotic version of Happyland’s Smokey Mountain. Why? Probably because they were easier to get rid of than the Muslim Brotherhood. “There are also worries that the Egyptian government is seeking to remove the Moqattam Village, also known as “Garbage City” entirely and relocate the Zabbalean further outside of Cairo 25 km away to a 50-feddan plot (1 feddan = 1.038 acres), in Cairo’s eastern desert settlement of Katameya.” That would not only pointlessly oppress the Copts, once the inhabitants of Egypt before the Islamic conquest and now reduced to scraping the streets clean of trash, but probably produce even higher piles of trash in Cairo. But that’s how it goes. Given the enormous security challenges facing the country, a Google search on “gays in the military” yields 2.5 times more hits than “Mubarak Egypt”.
As Marie Antoinette was reputed to have said “if people can’t eat bread, let them eat cake”.
And speaking of trash heaps, with the unrest now spreading to Algeria and Jordan, Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post concludes that maybe the Obama administration’s policies may have put them on course to joining dictators in “the ash heap of history”. She writes:
What will the Obama team learn from this? Perhaps it will understand, if not acknowledge, that its coziness with dictators has been unwise. And maybe more sober heads will admit that Obama’s obsession with the Middle East peace process was equally misguided. If the administration can attend to the Middle East “democracy deficit,” as Abrams calls it, we might be able to turn failure into success. The alternative is to side with the aging Sunni despots who are headed for the grave and the ash heap of history.
The ash heap of history. A lot more than Mideast foreign policy may be heading there now. The administration’s strategic miscalculations have been vast. Like the Mubarak regime, Washington has been been weighed down by a corrupt memory space. It too is looking for a memetic reboot. From ignoring the fact that the Middle East, not Southwest Asia, was the strategic center of gravity, to starting Obamacare medical program in the middle of a deficit crisis and pushing carbon trading and green energy at a time of an energy and food production are critical, they have set up a whole string of things for an epic fail.
And they will fail. Because if something can’t go on, then it won’t. Gravity wins in the end. A generation of ideologues have spent the Western legacy into the dirt to pursue their fantasy. Now the mansion is dark and water may soon be cut off. The creditors are waiting at the door and calls to friends go unanswered. Slowly the idea may be sinking in. The talk show circuit can’t save them any more.
Bad ideas live on in policy. And bad policy eventually creates a crisis which cannot be solved within its framework. The Obama administration probably ended at the beginning of 2011. It cannot think itself out of problems that it cannot understand.”
http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2011/01/27/dustbins-i-have-known/#more-12333
this is not a tip But a question
Has anyone ever heard anymore on the charge against Liberal MP Pablo Rodriguez?
Door opens for gay blood donors: Blood donor agency wants lifetime ban lifted for gay men
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/928904–blood-donor-agency-wants-lifetime-ban-lifted-for-gay-men
What a bloody shame.
I figure I’ll just stop giving blood. Back in the 70s, Canadian Blood Services, formerly the Red Cross, allowed HIV/AIDS tainted blood to be used for two years, knowing that it was tainted before they did anything, in deference to the sensitivities of gays.
I’m getting really fed up with this pandering to a very tiny but vocal and often quite nasty minority, who think that the world is their oyster and if they want it, they should get it.
“A lifetime ban extending by one year every year is just not sustainable,” Lorna Tessier, director of public relations at Canadian Blood Services told the Star on Wednesday.
EXCUSE ME.
It’s sustainable if you keep enforcing this rule and I see no reason to not keep it in place. Innocent lives are at stake. Public safety needs to trump offended sensibilities in the gay community.
One comment at the Star: Man is a slow learner: Here we go again, round 2 of tainted blood just waiting to happen. Political correctness gone nuts.
Ditto.
batb, ditto.
batb – I tried donating blood a few months ago. I made an appointment, went to the clinic, let them prick my finger, filled-out a form, the works. But in the end they didn’t let me donate (much to my relief, since I hate needles).
Wanna know why? I lived in the U.K. for several years over a decade ago.
re. Travis Corcoran
Grey Lady, my apologies, I missed it. I was also wrong about the date, it wasn’t from last week, it appears to be several weeks old.
What Corcoran wrote was insensitive and perhaps in poor taste, but it’s not illegal, nor is he an idiot for writing it.
Corcoran has been deprived of his 2nd amendment rights, solely because he wrote something that someone in authority found unsavory.
It also appears that he was wrong to trust those authorities. This reaction is what I found interesting (and yes, a bit creepy), not the content of his post.
Brava, Black Mamba! Sorry you couldn’t give. I was almost banned for the same reason, but was in England a few months outside of their ban dates.
The worst, IMO, is the finger prick. I hate it!
There are only 2% of Canadians who donate blood on a regular basis. It would be a real shame if a number of us decided to stop giving. For me, it would be because I have lost confidence in the CBS. Any organization which capitulates to a noisy, protected minority who, after all, doesn’t have a right to donate blood and is a group at high risk of carrying AIDS and/or HIV, plus other blood-borne viruses and bacteria, would be highly suspect in my mind.
Ha!
Rahm’s kind of town.
SDHm
Apologies are totally unnecessary, one can not be expected to read everything. :O)
I totally agree with your take on the Corcoran issue. It is a very important infringement on a human beings rights. I find it a tad concerning that some folks are more then willing to accept it because they feel the author has poor comic timing or poor taste in commentary.
YEAH Noel Coward!
How about “Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs. Worthington” or “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” and . . . and . . . and . . .?
WHAT a treasure he is! SO clever (just his rhymes: sigh!)—always.
How I missed this one, I don’t know: ’vintage, delicious Coward! (I was singing along in the blink of an eye!) And how amazingly non PC and prescient this song is. I didn’t think my regard for Mr. Coward could improve—but it has!
THANK YOU, EBD!
batb and Black Mamba:
That just makes my blood boil. So to speak. I turned 17 in 1992 and started giving blood right then–my mother gave blood regularly when I was young and still does. It seemed natural and normal.
Fast forward to 2001. I’m living in Halifax temporarily, and go to give blood. Everything’s fine until about a month later I get a letter telling me that I had tested positive for hepatitis (can’t remember, A or B.) but that was a very rough test, and they did another, more accurate, one, showing definitively that I did not have any form of hepatitis. Unfortunately, because of the one positive test that was proven to be wrong, I was given a permanent deferral. My test was what they call a “false reactive”. The last time I gave blood was October of 2001.
I have since been in communication with CBS and all they do is send a form letter saying that they are looking at ways to allow false-reactive-tested people back in the system, blah blah blah blah.
The point is that they have proof that my blood is fine and despite that, I cannot give blood. The CBS has been dropping in my esteem for 10 years now, and I imagine that, because of similar stories across the country, Canada’s blood supply has been needlessly lower than it could be.
Stupid bureaucratic BS.
Johann – clearly they don’t really want perfectly good blood, soppy guilt-inducing commercials notwithstanding. “Blood. It’s in you to give.”
Well, I guess it’s not like we’re going to check out Canadian Blood Services’ competitors or something, is it?