The Answer to the Gun Problem

Greetings, gentle readers.
I recently spent a ridiculous amount of time and column inches rambling about the reasons why it is impossible to create a normal and civil conversation about the number of mass shootings in the United States.  Before I could reach my conclusions about how to transcend those discussions and achieve consensus, I was overcome by exhaustion and forced to abbreviate my observations.
Thankfully for those that wish to follow my ideas and cannot wait for my body to achieve the sort of physical condition to mechanically express the logical conclusions of the arguments, there are other minds at work in the wide world.
As a prime example, I would like to refer you to this article:  HERE.  It does the exact opposite of what I've done — it skips past all of the awful rhetorical tricks and procedural sidesteps and gets to the actual problem.
To summarize: there is no quick answer, no bill, no regulation, no executive order that will cure this epidemic.  To even insist that there is one is foolish.
Here's the thing - the culture is violent, and this is the one occasion where trickle-down works. 
If the government establishes its core values as those of compassion and caring, this culture of violence will decay.  Other than that, here are four steps to stop your citizens from murdering one another.

1. Stop drone-bombing countries like Pakistan, Yemen, and Chad.  If you want to declare war, declare war.  These extra-jurisdictional killings are awful, illegal, and set a bad precedent for your own children.
2. Admit refugees.  If you are going to widow women and orphan children, consider their lives valuable enough to consider them worthy of admission to your awful country.
3. Stop occupying countries.  Nothing screams hypocrisy like enforcing military law on a bunch of innocent people while screaming that you are forcing liberty down their collective throats.  After 20 years, Afghanistan doesn't seem to have created a functioning democracy.  Conclusion:  Americans are terribly good at shooting people in the cause of democracy, but have no idea how it works in any sort of practical manner.
4. Stop creating or supplying insurgencies.  Why did five American Marines wash up downstream in Niger last year?    Isn't it odd how American Marines show up whenever a trade negotiation for natural resources goes sour?

In short, take everything the Nixon administration learned, add a couple of Carter things in, and then ignore everything else since, and you might be able to form a foreign policy.
In short-term, band-aid solutions won't work.  Politicians might be able to score points from little policy changes, but those victories will be meaningless.  The country as a whole must be able to shift from an ignorant global bully to a an entity capable of contributing to significant economic and climate change. 
A country committed to values of compassion and accomplishment could be one that could establish public works programs of renewable energy sources and develop technologies for the stars.  A country mired in entrenching its citizens in centuries-old cycles of poverty is destined to reduce society's ambitions indefinitely.

Meanwhile...

• We Could Live, by Big Sugar
• If That Were Me, by Melanie Chilsholm
• Come to California, by Matthew Sweet
• Halloween, by Aqua
• Follow Your Daughter Home, by The Guess Who
• Suspicious Minds, by Fine Young Cannibals

And that is all there is left of me.
Good night England and the Colonies.
Cheers,
—mARKUS

Civil Discourse

Greetings, gentle readers.
Another day, another mass shooting in the United States.  This is the cue for thousands of people to clamour for some sort of solution or remediation.  There is a problem, and the solution is ridiculously complex and difficult.  But before anyone can come to any sort of consensus of how to start approaching the issue, the entire environment of the conversation becomes polluted so that the objectives are lost, and all that remains is rancor, malice, and disrespect.
This about clouding the issue and muddying the waters of a serious social discussion.

Definitions

Douglas Adams made several references to philosophers as pure sophists, wasting time examining inconsequential shades of meaning in the terms of questions, rather than looking at the salient concepts or ideas behind any given question.  His point was that because philosophy as a whole does not hold any concrete answers, it is better to evade questions that give nebulous answers.
In an era where the President of the United States routinely tells untruths and challenges any contradictory evidence as being fake, it has become easy to derail legitimate inquiries by suddenly making the conversation about language.  Take THIS article to see the impact that language spin has on discourse.
I will give you a prime example of what I am describing.  When polled about their preferences regarding guns in the United States, there is a marked discrepancy between the numbers recorded when the question asked "Do you believe in increasing gun safety" rather than "Do you believe in increased gun control regulations?"  More numbers HERE.  It's much like the abortion debate, where both opposing camps sought to spin their stance positively into the pro-life and the pro-choice campaigns.  Eager for popular approval, each tried to use language with affirmative connotations to market their platform.
Equally distracting and confusing are statistics, and the language associated with them.  "Mass shootings" are different than "mass killings" and "multiple homicides" and "serial murders."  Someone will try to express the immediacy of the issue by citing a statistic saying that there have been x mass shootings in 2018, or x mass shootings per day in the 21st century, or a mass shooting every x days.  Rather than recognize the concern or the enormity of the numbers, a common deflection is to challenge the wording.  How many people must be killed for it to be a "mass" shooting?  Does it require an automatic weapon?  A single location?  Once it is established that a mass shooting involves a distinct number of deaths (in excess of three?  Four?), and not just woundings (even if they later turn out to be fatal woundings), and that it must all be conducted on public property, the conversation has been sufficiently deflected to the point that everyone must spend their time recalibrating their numbers and searching for examples and counter-examples.

False Equivalences

If one can get past the smokescreen that everyone is using the wrong words to ask the questions about why the last batch of innocent people were gunned down, then one is confronted by the weird and logically convoluted maze of false equivalences.  There are a variety of these, but there are four big ones that I've observed in the American "Why are so many innocent people being shot dead" debate.

1. America is Exceptional.  And not in a good way.Gun deaths of any sort - homicide, suicide, accident, indigestion - are lower in every other country on the planet.  Even the ones with civil wars.  Any stats that compare the U.S. to, say, Switzerland will look ridiculous, but that's because the Swiss didn't build their confederacy on slavery, have a solid social safety net, and mandatory conscription in their armed forces.  The Swiss are responsible, trained gun owners with low societal instance of poverty and discrimination.  Any question that asks "Why can't the U.S. be like [insert country here]?" is foolish because the U.S. is inherently culturally flawed in ways that other countries haven't considered yet.
2. Appeal to the Founding FathersThomas Jefferson was a very insightful fellow, and between him, Alexis de Tocqueville, and a pack of other enlightenment thinkers, we have documents like the U.S. Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and Bill of Rights.  In those documents, there are several enshrined principles like the separation of church and state, and the checks and balances on the different branches of government.  That being said, these men were not infallible.  The Amendments to the U.S. Constitution are testament to that.  It took the American Republic almost a hundred years to do something about that slavery thing, and suffrage for women was an even tougher struggle.  To speculate about the founding fathers' thoughts about modern weapons is about as useful as asking them about vaccines or marijuana regulation.
3. ReligionThere are numerous dog-whistles that bring all the evangelicals baying into one's yard.  Even if the discussion is about red wine with veal, religious folk will blurt out enough outrage to derail any topic if given a chance.  In other words, if you don't want to discuss guns, the conversation can be easily be diverted by creating a false equivalence between gun regulations and abortion, the holocaust, or the Spanish Inquisition.  I suppose that such comparisons seem relevant because they involve death and some sort of government involvement, but otherwise, they are logically unrelated.  I have no idea what this sort of idiocy is trying to assert.
   
   
   The logic of this argument is not even weak, it is non-existent.  But because Planned Parenthood has been introduced as a villain (unfairly), suddenly the discussion has again been deflected and the problem goes unaddressed.
4. Racism
   Speaking of dog-whistle speech patterns, there is no deflection tactic quite like the scapegoating tactic.  Essentially, if a problem is identified as being immediate and dangerous, rather than looking for any sort of personal responsibility or communal involvement, why not place the blame for all of society's ills – including the most recent tragedy – on a specific group?  Instead of the usual "foreign boogeymen" of Jews or gypsies, the United States of the present day is terrified of the people it has disenfranchised.  The families fleeing the constant drone bombings in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, etc. join those who are fleeing the death squads in Central America that have been sponsored by the American government.  If you want to start investigating, you can start by looking at Berta Cáceres and articles like THIS.  In short, some people like to portray the problem of people being shot as a result of those darn foreigners.

If you can fight your way through all of this distraction and deflection, you might start to see your way through to the truth.  The problem is the culture.  Culture is not the product of an individual, a government program, or a linguistic trend.  I will outline a larger plan later, but here is a quick outline:

• Stop desperation.  Reduce poverty and property crime will decrease.  I promise.
• Invest in the future.  Let people know that they are wanted and then welcome their contributions.
• Let freedom ring.  Stop censorship.  Period.  Let gory dismemberments be put in the same category as full frontal nudity.  Let Nazis expose themselves as fools.  Let all of the flowers in the garden blossom before you trim them (using logic and reason) rather than using authority to stifle their expression.

Meanwhile, here's a break from all the political stuff.

Shower Songlist

As always, I ask for someone to find a common thread between all of these song tracks, and although no one ever has, I ask regardless.

• Never Say Never, by Melanie Chisholm
• Pretending, by Eric Clapton
• Fools, by Lightning Seeds
• Pimper's Paradise, by Bob Marley and the Wailers
• So Long To U, by Beautiful Small Machines
• Carnivale de Paris, by Dario G

And with that, I bid you all a fair adieu.
Cheers,
—mARKUS

The Triumph of Mediocrity

Greetings, gentle readers.
Elements and categories of popular entertainment have always had their ebbs and flows in terms of quality, quantity, and sophistication.  The Aztecs had all sorts of sports that involved horrific mutilations performed on the losing competitors — a tradition carried on in modern day Latin America where, as Douglas Adams notes in "The Meaning of Liff," the ball games consist of the ball being hit against a wall until the prisoner confesses.
For most of the 20th century, artists aspiring to become popular entertainers needed to sacrifice all dignity and integrity at the feet of the gatekeepers of their chosen industry.  This was particularly true for women.  Carrie Fisher rather succinctly described it in the title of her book "Surrender the Pink."  Apparently, those were the words - verbatim - spoken to her by a producer as he gestured her toward a proverbial casting couch.
The bottom line was that the people with the power and authority to sign the contracts to make someone a star of stage, screen, airwaves, vinyl, etc. were generally odious men with a penchant for using sexual degradation to emphasize their dominance.  The victims tended to be women like Fisher, or pre-adolescent boys like Coreys Haim and Feldman.  The bottom line is this:  in a society where there is an overabundance of people willing to do literally anything for fame, and the avenue to that accomplishment is guarded by skeezy, power-happy, flabby old men, the tendency for that situation to involve abuse was nigh-universal.
Then came Harvey Weinstein and the #MeToo movement.  Suddenly, skeletons were coming out of closets and the world's worst-kept trade secret was suddenly front-page news.  Marlee Matlin, Rose McGowan, Annabella Sciorra, Ashley Judd, and dozens of other celebrities were suddenly fountains of information about the price of access to the red carpets and Beverly Hills cocktail parties.
I'm just going to throw three observations out there, the last leading to my overall theme about the relationship of talent, skill, and sophistication to successful entertainment careers.

Not everything is being revealed.

For those aspiring entertainers that were abused, debased, defiled, humiliated, molested, and raped, I can offer sympathy, support, and solidarity.  That being said, there are two elements that made the casting couch culture function:  people desperate to be famous, and grotty executives that can create careers with a contract.  I suspect for every person who was mistreated by said grotty executives, there is at least one other person who walked into those sorts of "negotiations" with his or her eyes wide open, prepared to do whatever it takes to get that record deal or daytime soap role.  There's a reason the system was so pervasive and enduring.  The same thing that made victims ashamed to come forward is the same reason that mediocre talents were able to gain access and exposure.  There are a thousand more stories yet to be told, and not all of them fit the narrative of patriarchal exploitation.

This isn't the most salient example of rape culture.

Around the same time as Harvey Weinstein and his ilk were being harried onto private jets for some intense therapy in Switzerland, a disgusting cretin named Roy Moore was campaigning to win a Senate seat in Alabama in a special election to replace Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, who had left his post to become U.S. Attorney General.
Roy Moore has been accused of varying types and degrees of sexual misconduct by the women listed below, who state that he interfered with them sexually while they were still younger than the age of majority.

• Leigh Corfman
• Wendy Miller
• Debbie Wesson Gibson
• Gloria Thacker Deason
• Beverly Young Nelson
• Gena Richardson
• Becky Gray
• Tina Johnson
• Kelly Harrison Thorp

Since coming forward, these women have been harassed and bullied by those who suspect them of lying with the intent to slander the candidate.  Tina Johnson's home in Gadsen, Alabama was burnt to the ground on 3 January 2018 in a suspected arson attack.
In short, Roy Moore defeated Donald Trump-endorsed Republican candidate Luther Strange to become the Republican nominee.  It's fairly upsetting that Republicans would choose the worse of two evils, but then in the final election, Moore almost managed to win the Senatorial seat.  Were it not for the concerted and earnest efforts of black women, this disgusting piece of subhuman garbage would have joined the ranks of the other quasi-evangelical hypocrites that clutch their bibles as they violate every ethical principle they purport to represent.  So America owes a debt of gratitude to women of colour, but the fact remains that Moore only lost by 1.5%.  That's a hair's breadth.  That a ghastly kiddie-diddler could potentially get elected to the United States Senate based on what one supposes must be partisan and identity politics is a terrifying prospect.  But how is such a thing plausible?
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the forty-fifth President of the United States.  In a single swoop, his election legitimized and validated every outdated and outmoded racist, sexist, exclusionary, and xenophobic mode of thought.  In what esteem does the leader of the free world hold women?

“You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them.  It’s like a magnet.  Just kiss.  I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it.  You can do anything… Grab them by the pussy.  You can do anything.” —Access Hollywood, 2005

And what about people from Mexico?

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending the best.  They’re not sending you… they’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems with us.  They’re bringing drugs.  They’re bring crime (sic).  They’re rapists.  And some, I assume, are good people.” — Presidential candidacy announcement, June 2015.

How about people of a religion like Islam?  He even speaks of himself in the third person for this one:

“Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” — Rally in Charleston, SC, December 2015

So that's gender, nationality, and religion.  How about LGBTQ rights?

"It’s like in golf.  A lot of people — I don’t want this to sound trivial — but a lot of people are switching to these really long putters, very unattractive.  It’s weird.  You see these great players with these really long putters because they can’t sink three-footers anymore.  And I hate it.  I am a traditionalist.  I have so many fabulous friends who happen to be gay, but I am a traditionalist.” — New York Times interview, May 2011

Oh, and then there are his views on veterans.

“[John McCain’s] not a war hero.  He’s a war hero because he was captured.  I like people who weren’t captured.” — Ames, IA in July 2015

The list goes on and on.  His creepy statements and photographs involving his daughter Ivanka are a tad more than nauseating, and his personal attacks on Megyn Kelly, Rosie O'Donnell, Mika Brzezinski, Lindsay Lohan, Kim Kardashian, and Kristen Stewart are stupefying as well as profoundly stupid.
The man holding the highest office in America speaks in the dog-whistle language that appeals to the lowest and basest human instincts of selfishness and paranoia. 
With such a role model, it is not difficult to imagine that hate-filled deviants should coast to pre-eminence in his poisonous wake.
Oh, and by the way, here is a list of some of the women who have formally complained that the president's conduct constituted sexual misconduct and/or assault.  The complaints include groping, fondling, kissing, and other forms of unwanted physical attention.  Again, in a world where women should be allowed to speak their truth to power and should be taken seriously, believed, and supported, people like Oprah Winfrey and other #MeToo and #TimesUp activists are profoundly silent.  Easy to use social media to pick on Hollywood sleazebags, but when the rot is in the Oval Office, suddenly nobody has anything to say.

• Kristen Anderson
• Mariah Billado
• Lisa Boyne
• Rachel Crooks
• Tasha Dixon
• Jessica Drake
• Jill Harth
• Cathy Heller
• Samantha Holvey
• Ninni Laaksonen
• Jessica Leeds
• Melinda McGillivray
• Cassandra Searles
• Natasha Stoynoff
• Bridget Sullivan
• Temple Taggart
• Karena Virginia
• Summer Zervos

The bottom line here is that you can accuse, shame, excoriate, and ostracize Harvey Weinsteins all the live-long day, but as long as the 45th President of the United States sets the example that legitimizes pussy-grabbing and all of the other dehumanizing practices he praises, Oprah Winfrey's "new day" is not on the horizon.  The roots of patriarchal misogyny are deep, and they are institutionalized in organized religion as much as they are in the current White House administration.

The same system is still being perpetuated, despite #MeToo.

And finally we end up at the intersection of politics and the arts.  Using the old casting couch culture, talentless mooks could make their way into positions of public exposure.  But has shouting down Harvey Weinstein eradicated that culture?  The existence of Trumps and Moores would seem to indicate that while some progress has been made in the entertainment sector, society as a whole still seems to value the idea that amateurish schmucks can jump the queue and go from shower-stall crooner to multi-platinum recording artist, or from junior high school Broccoli Stalk #3 to Matt Damon's next love interest.
It has been said that excellence within the context of a particular discipline can be achieved with ten thousand hours of applied learning and practice.  However, the shortcut of sacrificing one's dignity and self-respect seems to be equally acceptable.  Sure, fellating Howard Hughes will no longer get you a role in a major motion picture but rather a potential prison sentence for necrophilia, depending on the legal jurisdiction you inhabit.  Instead of debasing one's self in private, the new fad is to force people to do so on produced television.
The latest thing is "The Launch," a reality television show.  Let's examine some of the elements.  The prize is fame, exposure, and a record label contract.  In order to win the prize, you must win the favour of a grotty, middle-aged white man.  In the meantime, your rehearsals and practice time is aired in front of a viewing audience eager to relate to common, ordinary "Harrison Bergeron"-esque talentless performances.
No sex on air, of course, but I'm sure the interwebs will compensate for that soon enough as soon as some of the contestants are thrown onto the trash heap of pop culture history.  And Americans are very shy about sex.  Where Yankees used to chastise British people for being prudes, the amount of censorship in the United States is reaching ridiculous proportions.  How many television networks were allowed to repeat the president's statement “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” verbatim?
To echo the great Lenny Bruce, American media bathes in blood.  The violence available for viewing on any of the major networks is as intense as any centerfold from "Fangoria" magazine on a daily basis.  But any tender and loving moment between two caring individuals that shows a nipple?  Verboten.  Thrown onto the bonfire of "degenerate art."
What does "The Launch" mean for American society and its valuation of art?   Well, apparently the contestants don't even need to win the competition, as they can now release singles directly to iTunes and Spotify and whatever other online distribution system and start racking up platinum sales before the show even concludes.
This essentially means that popular music now is not being performed, recorded, and distributed based on merit.  These are not virtuoso musicians that have spent the 10,000 hours to perfect their art.  They haven't fine-tuned and honed their stagecraft by playing at gigs in venues of different sizes with audiences of different tempers.  Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork paid their dues and busked on streetcorners, and learned what riffs got the most pennies in a hat.  Then they managed to get songs written by Carole King and Neil Diamond to propel them to stardom as The Monkees.
The bottom line here is that the vast majority of popular music being marketed at the public now is less sophisticated and authentic than The Monkees.  Mediocrities that haven't even convinced the grotty white guy to award them the victory are flooding the market, and because the delivery system is so automatic and convenient, money is flowing into the studio labels for free.  That's right, studio A&Rs can release five or six singles (one from every competitor) without signing any of them.  Eventually, they'll sign one of the groups, offer them something miserable, milk as much sales as they can, and then drop them in the dustbin.  Why?  To do anything else would require investment.  This is about profit and getting people to pay them money, not about rewarding artists for artistic merit.  Reality TV exists as a cheap way to fill airtime where there are no expenses for scriptwriters or directors, and the unpaid warm bodies double as performers and marketing devices.
Does anyone remember the group "Next"?  They were number one on Billboard's Top 100 Hot Songs in 1998.  Can you name the single?  Yup.  Twenty years from now, the poor William Hung wannabes that embarrassed themselves on national television will be wishing that they had the kind of enduring fame that Bobby Pickett earned.  Meanwhile, the public will at least have the convenience of deleting the unoriginal filler from their smartphones rather than grow to adulthood and have their shelves cluttered with anodyne dreck that any six-year old with a 1982 Casio electronic keyboard could produce.

Shower Songlist

Again, like a crossword puzzle, anyone who can determine the common factors among all or most of these tracks gets to act intellectually superior and smug for an undefined period of time.  Outwit the shuffle function, and you may demonstrate some sort universal principle of existence.

• Tusk, by Fleetwood Mac
• Help Me Rhonda, by The Beach Boys
• Fifty Mission Cap, by The Tragically Hip
• Bombs Away, by Johnny Clegg and Savuka
• Around the World, by Aqua
• Kashmir, as performed by Jimmy Page and Robert Plant (Unplugged)
• Ring of Fire, by Johnny Cash
• Hockey Night in Canada Theme, by CBC musicians of some sort
• Rockin' World, by Joe Strummer
• Brain Drain, by Lightning Seeds

And I think that's about enough out of me for the multiple sittings that it has taken.  Hope that most of it is coherent.  Until next time, goodnight England and the Colonies.
—mARKUS

Mason-Dixon Hockey

Greetings, gentle readers.
It's a topic oft-beaten like the proverbial dead horse or rented mule or some other unfortunate ungulate, but I'll return once again to that well in search of some sort of purgative satisfaction.  I watched a fair portion of a game of hockey between the Edmonton Oilers and the Florida Panthers.
Let's address the points one by one.
I have nothing against the poor schlubs who play for the Florida Panthers.  They are doing a job and they are being paid handsomely for doing the thing that they love.  I'm sure that workers at the factories that produced Zyklon-B in the 1930s and 1940s took that same job satisfaction home to their families.  In fact, I feel very sorry for them.  They were even more depressed and unhappy than the Oilers, who were forced to play in front of their illustrious forebears of 35 years prior who conquered all before them in ridiculously awe-inspiring fashion.  Quick note - the team of 1984-85 had three players who scored over 100 points (Gretzky, Kurri, Coffey).  Those three won the Art Ross/Hart, Lady Byng, and the Norris Trophies, respectively.  The team also finished the season with 109 points, despite only clocking TWO shutouts.  In an 80 game season, they scored over 400 goals meaning that they averaged FIVE goals per game.
The present day Oilers can't measure up against that.  They are a faint echo of nigh-godhood.  The league is prejudiced against them.  The city is fighting through a deep financial ambivalence about the new arena.  Much sadness.  The Panthers are much worse off.

League prejudice is off the intercoursing hook.  There was one brief tableau in the game when all of the Oilers players stopped playing and gesticulated at the nearest official.  There are four of them on the ice, for those that have stopped counting.  In the first period, the Oilers were penalized for having six (non-goaltending) skaters on the ice, for which Darnell Nurse served a two-minute penalty.  When the Panthers committed the exact same offence later in the game, it went unregarded by the aforementioned four officials, despite the pleas of the legal five skaters for the Oiler team.  I get it.  The NHL wants teams in big money, large catchment American markets.  The recipe for making Americans pay money for things they don't understand is to advertise aggressively.  Advertising in the United States is built on exceptionalism - we are winners, be a winner, join us.  Add them together, and you have to give victories to teams that need exposure, not those that earn wins through skill, endeavour, or tactical acumen.  Any sort of merit, really, other than the potential to earn money.
Further to the above point, it is nice to see that ice hockey is getting more television airtime.  There seems to be a game on every night.  Unfortunately, those games invariably feature one of three teams -  the Tampa Bay Buccalightning, the Florida Trail of Tears, and the Las Vegas WrongMetal Knights.  (for those not keeping track, Nevada is the SILVER State.)  Those three teams get inordinate media exposure as per the All-Star Game, as well as disproportionately favourable treatment from the league and the officiating crews thereof.  The Mickey Mouse team from Anaheim received the same treatment when it paid in its huge franchise expansion fee.  Money talks, and athletic sportsmanship walks.If you've got a half-billion dollars to throw at Shorty Halfman, you too can have a WINNING (though not necessarily successful) NHL franchise. 

Too long; didn't read:  as soon as Quebec or Winnipeg didn't make the numbers, the NHL shut the doors on them.  But look at the numbers for Arizona, Florida, and Carolina according to ESPN.  They suck worse than the Canadian franchises ever did, but they get bailed out like the bloated and irresponsible Wall Street institutions that have morally bankrupted the... whoop, getting off topic.
Before I cut to the musical interpretation bit, I want to stress this one point.  I feel sorry for the poor bastards that play for the Florida Panthers. They play in an empty mausoleum of a building in Florida filled with empty corporate banks of seats and pensioners that want a coffee in an air-conditioned building.  When they are on the road, their relatives are too ashamed to cheer when they score a goal, so all of their accomplishments may as well be performed on the dark side of the moon during something that really captures the American public's attention, like a fidget spinner or a new iPhone app that defines pronouns.
So the game last night had lots of goals, including one from a penalty shot.  Whee.  The Oilers were just trying to show the legends in the rafters that they had graduated from juniors, and the johnny lunchbucket that scored a hat-trick for the SwampGator Seminole Killers got as much applause as Harvey Weinstein at a #MeToo luncheon.  Florida scored seven goals.  Seven.  Three for Johnny Lunchbucket.  The lads on the bench could barely raise their gloves for a celebratory fistbump because they were so busy calling their agents and screaming "Trade Me Right Fucking Now!" 

Conclusion

So what?  Who cares? 
Answer:  because every once in a while, there is some asinine pillock who will assert that, because he or she has met a professional weasel-fondler once, that the experience has given the person the authority to dictate that spectators cannot influence sports. 
"It doesn't matter how loudly you shout at your television, it won't change the game."
You've heard it.  You may have even said it.  It's still wrong.
If a tree falls in a forest and no-one applauds it, facts A and B are disconnected and unrelated.  Human emotions are not so easily categorized and dissociated.  If you win a gold medal at the Olympics and your mother cries when you wave to her from the podium, you may as well ask that tree to replant itself and fall all over again for all of the good an analogy will do.
If you don't think that the fans can help their team, fine.  The Toronto Maple Leafs haven't won a Stanley Cup since 1967, and they've sold out every game for the intervening fifty years.  Newcastle United haven't won the English top title in over ninety years, but they routinely sell out an enormous stadium with a capacity of over 52,000.  The argument can be made that goodwill and passion are meaningless when faced with those examples.  If one accepts that argument, then human achievement is equally meaningless. 

Plato reduced humanity to needing, reasoning, and esteeming.  Freud rephrased that as the id, the ego, and the superego.  The conclusion is the same - you need to eat, breathe, drink, stay warm, etc, to live.  Yay.  If you don't meet those criteria, you're not reading this and I don't care about you because you're dead.
The reasoning or ego bit is a little more complex.  HOW do I get food, build shelter, drink non-contaminated water, avoid death by predators, etc.?  If you have parents that held more than a passing interest in you, these are not that complicated.  Some people have progenitors that never had a pet and always wanted to name something LeDaDawnequisha.  We all have our crosses to bear.
The Superego, or as the SPA (Socrates-Plato-Aristotle) would call it, the thymos (θυμός) is the WHY.  An accomplishment is not an accomplishment if it is not praised or esteemed as such.
I'm sure that lots of homo sapiens sapientis ran a lot.  Some of the footprints are still immortalized on the Eastern Cape of Africa.  But we don't know who did it.  Identity becomes important when we consider Pheidippides.  Who is he?  He ran the first marathon. 
Go run 26 miles and 385 yards.  Maybe you feel happy.  Maybe you get some serotonin happening in your system.  Run the same distance in Boston on the third Monday in April, and a different thing happens.
Bottom line: humans are social animals and we need to feel wanted and important in one another's estimation.  If you think that athletes are any different, you are either a sociopath or fast on your way to becoming one.

Shower Songlist

• Big Love, by Fleetwood Mac
• Misty Mountain Hop, as performed by Dread Zeppelin
• Drag City, by The Beach Boys
• Nkosi Yamakhosi, by Labysmith Black Mambazo
• Hey Little Girl, by Bad Manners
• Memphis Tennessee, as performed by George Thorogood
• Theme From Something Important, by the Traveling Wilburys
• Tubthumping, by Chumbawamba

What are the thematic conclusions that we can draw from these songs?  Hurm.  There are a few that seem to deal with female children, although in profoundly different ways.  "Memphis Tennessee" is a love song from a father to his daughter, while the others deal with romantic sorts of attachment.  As always, I would really appreciate any sort of interpretation.
That's it for now.  My medication schedule is in a tizzy, and I need to do some medical paperwork. And thus, until later, I bid thee a fair adieu.
Goodnight England and the Colonies,
—mARKUS

Tremendous Amounts of Snow

Greetings, gentle readers.
What we find is this:  Calgary is being smothered under a blanket of snow over a couple of dozen inches thick.  Traffic is treacherous and everyone who thinks that running light rail transit above ground in a country that experiences five months of winter a year should be shot and left in a ditch to be repeatedly showered with defecation.
That being said, I'm actually going to lead off with my iPod playlist, because we can comfortably segue from there.

Shower Songlist

• Blue Light, by David Gilmour
• How, by Lisa Loeb
• Auf Achse, by Franz Ferdinand
• Flight of the Phoenix, by Grand Funk Railroad
• No Time, by The Guess Who
• Natty Dreadlock-Rastaman Vibration-War Live Medley, by Bob Marley

From here, let's look at the lyrics of the last track.

Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior
Is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned -
Everywhere is war - Me say war.
That until there are no longer first class and second class citizens of any nation
Until the colour of a man's skin is of no more significance than the colour of his eyes -
Me say war.
That until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race -
Dis a war.
That until that day - the dream of lasting peace, world citizenship, rule of international morality
Will remain in but a fleeting illusion to be pursued, but never attained -
Now everywhere is war - war.

Placed in the context of the American political atmosphere of identity and division, Marley's words seem to echo strongly.  The fact that race has been repeatedly displaced as a point of discussion means that the current political establishment has no intention of actually addressing, let alone resolving the issue of unequal treatment under the Constitution on the basis of skin colour.
To rephrase that, whenever the point of unfair, unjust, and unequal treatment is raised, it is recategorized as something else.  NFL players began taking a knee during the national anthem to protest police brutality being disproportionately applied to people of colour.  Instead of discussing police violence, escalation tactics, and the extension of stop-and-frisk-style profiling based on skin pigment, we are asked to discuss patriotism.  Taking a knee is not seen as protest, but as disrespect for the national anthem.  And disrespecting the anthem means disrespecting the flag.  And disrespecting the flag is somehow disrespectful towards America's teeming and swelling ranks of veterans of their interminable foreign wars. 
Cops shoot unarmed black men at an alarming rate around the country, but a protest of that state of affairs is translated into a conversation about anthems, flags, veterans, and patriotism.  Somewhere in that translation, the question of race is buried, and the political establishment dodges another point of controversy.
Why does the establishment want to avoid discussing race?  Because it it part of the mechanics of American governance.  I'm reminded of President Lyndon Baines Johnson's famous quotation,

I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it.  If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket.  Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.

If you think that sounds a little cynical for the 36th President of the United States to say, you can check the veracity of the quotation HERE.  To quickly summarize, if you want people to vote against their own best interests, let them vote in favour of their basest instincts.
To extend Johnson's thought about pockets, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. reached a similar conclusion:   race is inextricably tied to economics.  Both King and Johnson believed in a "War on Poverty" because scarcity and need breed desperation and degradation.  When economic hardships are no longer a factor, discussions of a shared humanity can be more easily facilitated.  Unfortunately, in order for the political status quo to maintain its structure, a disadvantaged underclass is required and thus racism is an institutional function.
More on this later, but for now I must needs bid adieu.
Until next time, goodnight England and the Colonies.
—mARKUS

February Polar Vortex Express

Greetings, gentle readers.

Sports

First off, my congratulations to the Philadephia Eagles for winning their first-ever Super Bowl.  They not only defeated a significantly favoured opponent, but they did it using an entertaining and heroic philosophy.  Gambling on fourth-downs, trick plays, and two-point conversions, the Eagles demonstrated guts, confidence, and commitment to the fans.  Backup quarterback Nick Foles also managed to get into the history books for a number of different reasons.  He's one of only three guys to win the Superbowl despite starting three or fewer regular season games.  Of those three, he's one of two to get the game MVP award.  And he became the first man in NFL history to both catch and throw for a touchdown in the final game.  Combined, both teams contributed to the greatest total number of yards ever gained in a Super Bowl game.  A delight of a game, even for a neutral.  Which I am not.
On the negative side, the officiating crew responsible for the debacle at Anfield earlier in the day managed to swaddle themselves in shame and controversy.  If Liverpool FC's last game in the FA Cup showed how video review can make a game intolerably slow-paced, this game demonstrated how badly oversight is required to defeat rampant incompetence, corruption, or both.  It is rare for a team to receive a yellow card for "simulation" (diving) and then consequently receive two consecutive penalty awards for players collapsing to the ground in similar fashion.  Tottenham managed to wrestle a draw from a game in the dying minutes with some extraordinarily generous decisions from the referee and his assistants and it should be safe to say that the finances of those concerned will fall under some scrutiny.

Weather

Back in the day, Calgary was the home of the winter Chinook wind, a warm and moist breeze that gave week-long reprieves from otherwise relentlessly frozen, snowy, arctic conditions.  By the same token, Edmonton was just cold.  Desiccating, debilitating, depressing, and dehumanizing cold.  Childhood memories of walking backwards through the snow because the howling icy winds would freeze your eyelids shut were punctuated by thoughts that just 350 kilometres south, people in Calgary could walk to school in short sleeves because of that amazing and supernatural Chinook.
The world is a different place now, and Calgary's seasonal get-out-of-jail-free wind has become a thing of the past.  Whether that is because of massive tectonic activity shifting the Earth's axis of rotation, or because of sunspot activity, or anthropogenic climate change, or some sort of combination of factors, the past is gone, and it has been replaced with a fresh kind of hell for all concerned.

Shower Songlist

Considering the inches of fresh snow and bone-chilling conditions outside the window of my room, the conclusion that my iPod has a sense of humour is entirely viable.

• The Boys of Summer, performed by Bree Sharp
• Cruel, Cruel Summer, performed by Ace of Base
• Girlfriend, by Matthew Sweet
• In the Night Time, by George Thorogood and the Delaware Destroyers
• Strange Disease, by Prozzäk
• Communication, by The Cardigans
• Devil's Been Busy, by The Travelling Wilburys
• Waterfall, by The Electric Light Orchestra
• Achilles' Last Stand, by Led Zeppelin

Basically, the first two tracks seem to be the anomalies here, since they are both seasonally related and cover versions of songs written and originally performed by other artists.  Beyond that, there don't seem to be any readily observable commonalities between the songs.
And now, with an aching stomach and numb, tingling arm, I must bid adieu for the nonce.  I got a fair bit of physio exercise in today, but that also means that the exhaustion is decidedly more palpable.
Until next time, good night England and the Colonies.
—mARKUS

Southern Exposure

Greetings, gentle readers.
So here I am in chilly Calgary for the Groundhog Day weekend.  My arrival in Stampede Town nicely coincided with another pronounced appearance of the dreaded Polar Vortex on meteorological maps around North America.  Essentially, freezing blasts of ultra-cold air from the North Pole are streaking across Alberta, cutting a swath through the great plains down to Chicago before sweeping northeast again towards the St. Lawrence River.  The immediate practical upshot is that while yesterday's weather forecast called for slightly cool weather and light snow, the reality is that today's weather has been bitterly nasty with enough snowfall to cause the shutdown of several of the city's main traffic arteries amidst almost 300 vehicular collisions.
It's also been interesting to observe the close of the January transfer window in the English Premier League, as Henrikh Mkhitaryan and an awful amount of money left Manchester United in exchange for Arsenal's wantaway Chilean star Alexis Sanchez.  Arsenal also added Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang from Borussia Dortumnd to augment an already strong attacking front line.  The result was a 5-1 crucifixion of Everton earlier today, throwing newly appointed Everton manager Sam Allardyce into new dimensions of puce apoplexy.
Tomorrow morning will see Liverpool face off against table position rivals Tottenham Hotspurs, and I intend to retain consciousness through all of it, so I'm going to slither off for a quick kip now.
Before I go, there must be time enough for...

Shower Songlist

• All Along the Watchtower, by Dylan and the Dead
• My Beloved Monster, by Eels
• Sugar Coated Iceberg, by Lightning Seeds
• Face Down, Ass Up, by 2 Live Crew
• Missionary Man, by Annie Lennox
• Working in a Coal Mine, by Devo
• Doctor Jones, by Aqua
• The World Tonight, by Paul McCartney
• We've Got To Get Out Of This Place, by The Animals
• Wild Side, by Max Creek

As to any sort of thematic relevance within this particular list, the only speculation I might make would be that they all seem to make some sort of reference to geography in the lyrics or the title.  Except for the 2 Live Crew thing, which doesn't reference a whole lot of abstract anything.  I guess that would make the rest of them appropriate for a commentary on my temporary relocation.
I'll try and expand on some of my points tomorrow, when I've got a bit more energy.
Goodnight England and the Colonies.
—mARKUS