Quebec anglos : 'Divided we stand'
"Listening to them, you'd think we are completely repressed, undergoing some sort of ethnic cleansing," he said. "They don't listen to young anglophones. The average young anglophone is not bothered if the sign that says '3 per cent discount' is written in either language. It's all the same for us."
Melamid on art and religion
"I truly believe that art has become a religion. . . . If you like the Mona Lisa, God bless you, there's nothing wrong with that -- just as you can believe in Jesus, or in any God you want. But the organized church of art, those education departments that try to convince people by force of persuasion that this or that is good art, doesn't leave you any room or choice to say if something is good or bad. . . . They used to beat up children, now they show them paintings."
Komar and Melamid on Canada
"If these paintings are anything like what Canadians most want and hate to look at, then our avant-garde is in trouble. Like nations all around the world, we said we preferred softly traditional paintings of outdoor scenes -- so a gently rolling landscape is what we got. (The only people to prefer abstraction over realism, it seems, are the Dutch.)"
Professor Rusi Taleyarkhan
"I've always been a huge fan of Star Trek and wanted to see if the knowledge I have of energy systems could make a gun that a police officer could set to stun, just like Captain Kirk does."
It's America Day :
I have dual U.S. and Canadian citizenship. Some years ago I was flying to Boston from Montreal. I got up to the U.S. immigration guy at the airport and he dutifully asked me my citizenship. "Dual," I replied. He grunted and asked the question again. "Both," I repeated, " I was born in Canada. My entire family is American." Not impressed, he looked up and, glaring at me, said : "What citizenship are you...today?" Oh. "American," I quickly answered. After that, he smiled and waved me on with the words : "Welcome home, son."
Kelly Hagerton, Product Manager Elron Software
"It's only Orwellian when organizations spy and don't tell employees." And 2 + 2 = 5.
It's America Day
and I'm reading Benjamin Barber's
Jihad vs. McWorld. "Yet Jihad and McWorld have this in common: they both make war on the sovereign nation-state and thus undermine the nation'state's democratic institutions. Their common thread is indifference to civil liberty. Jihad forges communities of blood rooted in exclusion and hatred, communities that slight democracy in favor of tyrannical paternalism or consensual tribalism. McWorld forges global markets rooted in consumption and profit, leaving to an untrustworthy, if not altogther fictitious hand issues of public interest and common good that once might have been nurtured by democratic citizenries and their watchful governments." Something to think about on the day when a country that has given so much to the world, in spirit if not action, celebrates it's beginnings.