A Taliban bobsled team?

The Independent Observer and me wuz debriefing the other night, after the Games That Must Not be Named©®™, when one of us started asking dumb, semimythical questions about a suspiciously illogical link between sporting performance and national pride.

I'm not saying our Prime Minister ascribes to this dubious philosophy. But only because it seems kind of obvious already from the quality of his recent public electioneering ummm, pronouncements on the topic. That and his disturbing recent penchant for athlete-glomming photo-ops. I digress.

Anyway, some people seemed to place an awful lot of emphasis on a warlike beating of chests and thumping of rivals' noses into the snow. Almost as if they saw the games as a must-win-at-all-costs surrogate for military endeavour. Kinda like, say, certain failed former East European SSRs now known to have indulged in the odd steroidal binge during the Cold War.

But maybe this kinda stuff ain't much of a skate from the original Olympic ideal (Oops. Damn! Named 'em...). I mean, very early games may well have been set up to give warring Greek city-states a more wholesome outlet for their rivalries than, ummm, epic bloodshed.

So it occurred to us that maybe we could institute world peace if we just invited everybody to the games. Why couldn't everybody just get along? Maybe the Taliban are just cranky because they never get invited to play! And wouldn't it be cool to see a Taliban bobsled team instead of a Taliban insurgency?

Especially the part where they plant improvised trackside bombs to blow up rival bobsleds...

Mannequin Monday

I am going to miss these ladies. Although tempted, I am going to resist going in and asking if the "everything must go" sale includes the mannequins.

They are a few of a cast of many that I like to keep an eye on for fashion ideas. There are some who live with mannequins, I just stalk them.

This picture (below) is for Seventh Heathen who like me, finds that some of the mannequins can be disturbingly hot.


The Amazon informed us that she had never noticed the enticing powers of these statuesque sirens of shop windows.



Is there a mannequin that has caught your eye? Send me a picture (I might post it) and add a few words to describe what you find alluring about her or him. Send it to woodsy.nymph@gmail.com

RNDP 29: Dating with Technological Assistance

Missing the Chinook

Know first that I detest wind.

But yesterday's sodden nearspring snowstorm in Ottawa reminds me that I still miss Alberta's Chinook. Another name, Snow Eater, is disputed, but it's apt. A Chinook shrieking from its characteristic arched mouth of clouds on the western horizon devours snow. Somewhere into a third week of unrelenting hundred-kilometre winds, when your eyes fill with dry grit, you feel as if it gnaws your brain, too.

But I remember standing one year in a late January field, after weeks of singing, minus-thirty cold, feeling my lungs crack with each breath, when the crystallized air changed. The arch opened over the mountains, iciness suddenly softened.

I stood still, in stillness, feeling warmth begin to breathe around me for three-quarters of an hour. The temperature rose a degree a minute. The last moments, I could hear water starting to run under the snow. When the banshee wind finally pounced, the air temperature was well above zero.

I detest wind. But that dead of winter memory — less than an hour of moistening, warming, impossibly tropical stillness, is magic I hold close.

Image: Ann Kelliot's Photostream on Flickr

Time to publog the parliamentary dining room...

Senator Céline Hervieux-Payette has gleefully tweeted that the Parliamentary Dining Room will, for the first time, soon serve up seal on its justly-renowned silver platters.

Publog time! One simply can't turn down such an obviously-patriotic opportunity!

But in the spirit of full disclosure, one must warn fellow ESIs that one has actually eaten seal on occasion. As a practiced connoisseur of portable, potable furballs, I hafta say that, PETA-ensnaring terminal cutes aside, it is stringy, oily, dark, and more than kinda fishy-tasting. Maybe why they're doin' it sometime around the Ides of March.

You have been warned. And I hope the decadent mounds of chocolate-y desserts are especially good that day. . .