I went to International Talk Like a Pirate Day...

...and when I regained consciousness somebody had dressed me up in this goofy outfit. Next time, I'm sending Fourth Dwarf. He deserves it.

Varmints... and varmints

Full disclosure: Us coyotes are no fans of getting our fuzzy butts shot off. Especially by half-tons full of baseball-capped pseud cowboys, careening full tilt across the foothills, blasting merrily and often, with a astonishing range of rifles apparently all called "varmint guns". I gather that rural stop signs are often also varmints... I digress.

Another disclosure: Granny coyote used to excel at a very tricky high-speed dance that would lure drivers of such half-tons over big rocks that bent wheels, busted springs and punched holes in oil pans, while younger coyotes - hell, even passing jackrabbits - laughed our fuzzy butts off at safe distance. Granny was quite a joker.

Just so you know where I'm comin' from on this one. I have watcha might call an opinion about that long-gun registry the current government is so hellbent on, ummm, gunning down.

Really, the news a couple of days back that the US National Rifle Association was lending somewhat less-than-moral support to Canadian gun lobbyists was hardly a surprise, despite quick government and lobbyist denials. Their patented paranoid-nutbar brochure spiels about ill-defined freedom and the registry existing "so the police can come and take away all your guns in advance of a Nazi takeover" were cropping up here with tiresome regularity.

See, here's what I don't get. People drive cars, and need both operator and vehicle licenses to do so. Good idea, given that vehicles are, in the wrong hands and/or in the wrong situation, two-ton-plus weapons. As much as I enjoy hanging my tongue out the shotgun-side window into the breeze when Aggie drives me somewhere, I know they pack enough potential kinetic energy to kill.

Yet start talking about licenses for machines expressly designed to make enough kinetic energy to kill, and suddenly a bunch of people, many of whom ought to know better, start yelling "FREEDOMFREEDOMFREEDOM" at the tops of their leathery lungs. Yes, yes, yes, I know some weapons are useful tools for farmers and duck hunters too. A firearms registry does not make them any less useful to those who use 'em that way. Even supposing that gun ownership does equal freedom, freedom still equals responsibility. And registering weapons that blast big, irreparable holes in living organisms as a design feature is a reasonable, responsible thing to do in a civil democratic society, no matter what the hell the NRA, or anyone else, may yell at the top of their intriguingly well-rehearsed, very well-financed, voices.

That's the evil genius of the NRA - managing to conflate owning a gun with a big, hazy, near-undefinable motherhood word, using a withering barrage of fallacious arguments. The evil genius of the Conservative party is in playing politics with those acquired arguments, then preemptively accusing anyone who calls 'em out on it of 'playing politics'. And people call me a varmint!

As one of my coyote brethren from the Alberta days says, "Fallacious arguments during crooked 7-card stud seem to be all there are anymore..."

"Not finished yet" - Mayor Larry

Dear god. What could possibly be left for him to screw up...?

Annoying phrase of the day: Housing Bubble

Summer's end

Some weird summer, huh? I fell asleep on my boat in July drinking a beer, and when I woke up I was the mayor of Ottawa!

Oh, wait. Coyotes don't got boats. Or beers. So either I'm still snoozing and dreaming, or regretfully and regrettably channeling some other rather unreliable narrator...

Dear me. I seem to digress earlier and earlier in these little screeds. This time I derailed before I even nailed down a theme, which should have been something along the lines of, "We semi-mythical trickster types are mostly optimistic souls, happily anticipating our next LOLs." I mean, we always keep an eye open for rainbows. (Especially ones made of bacon. If you see one, lemme know care of this blog...) But some of the doings in this country in the past few months have left us feeling decidedly waterbowl-half-empty. -Ish.

However ya slice it, I've been left to ponder the murkier, bacon-challenged, recesses of the canine soul.

Now that we've steamed through the Labour Day Weekend, a municipal election looms, and that other unreliable narrator is busily re-spinning his sorry-ass mayoral record to make it resemble something a touch less disastrous.

And rumours of a federal election, as always, flit about like, well, rumours in Ottawa. To decide whether one will actually happen, you'd have to look into the mind of the PM. Just try not to look too long or deeply. It's icky. But he can pull the imperial prorogue gag only once or twice before the electorate gags, so we may be safe for a bit, yet.

The problem as I see it is that no politician at the moment seems capable of lighting the kind of fire that gets people enthusiastic and behind the cause. Any cause. There seem to be no causes except narrow minded, partisan jockeying for position. Meanwhile, political offices at all levels are begging for candidates with, oh, actual charisma, intelligence and ideas that embody an authentic zeitgeist, ethos or what-have-you.

Oh, us coyotes will probably watch - and yowl - anyway. We always do. But more and more, all we're really hoping for is to hang on for the appearance of the actual bacon - some kinda inspiration that we can buy into. Meantime, we're resigned to a long, nasty, ill-defined lumpy-cream-of-wheat kinda autumn...