In a nutshell / tombits…

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/04/2010 (5834 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

European lemmings line up on sealing issue

It is a pity that Newfoundlanders, Inuit from Nunavut and other Canadian sealers cannot vote in European elections. If they could, the European Parliament, one of the world’s most fatuously powerful organizations, might have an entirely different perspective on the Canadian seal hunt that has limped off to such a slow start this year.

One of the reasons that this hunt is expected to have a dramatically lower yield than usual is the weather, which is keeping some sealers at home. The main reason, however, is a ban on importing seal products imposed by the European Parliament last July to appease groups such as Greenpeace, Sea Shepherd, the World Wildlife Fund and the green goofs who blindly follow them and can vote. Since it is, ironically, the Europeans who traditionally buy most of the products of the Canadian seal hunt, this has eliminated most of the market and many sealers are not bothering to put out their boats this year.

Irony piles upon irony here, hypocrisy upon hypocrisy. As a recent article in The Economist pointed out, most Europeans, and hardly any European politicians, actually give a rat’s patootie about seals. If they think about them at all, they think of them as kind of locusts of the sea, a plague that devours fish stocks and deprives uncontrolled European fishing fleets that scour the seas from whitecap to seabed of part of their profits. Because of that, some of Europe’s fishing nations were until recently encouraged to kill seals to save the fish stocks.

The European Union even publishes a cookbook on how to prepare seals in various allegedly delicious ways, such as herb-stuffed seal schnitzel or seal Wellington with Madeira sauce.

The cookbook was part of an almost $500,000 campaign by the EU to encourage seal hunting in Europe where, as in Canada, the seal population growth has been rampant and is ravaging fish stocks.

The final irony of all this nonsense — aside from the mouse-that-roared trade war that it sparked between Europe and Nunavut; no Madeira for the seal Wellington in the Meta Incognita Peninsula from now on — is that the EU’s ban on seal products has also shut down Europe’s sealing industry and rendered the cookbook a quaint anachronism. A lot of Europeans are angry about that. A lot more Canadians should be angrier than they are.

 

Garbage in, garbage out goes for children’s books, too

I come from a family that has an odd age spread. I have a sister who is six years older than me and a sister who is seven years younger than me. It only occurred to us later in life that our parents did not so much breed children as they did babysitters — as each child came along there was one old enough to look after it.

So it was that my sister read Peter Pan to me when I was very young. It is, in fact, the first book I can remember having been read to me and it may explain why I turned out so badly.

Peter Pan is a book about a boy who refused to grow up, who fought deadly duels with pirates, kidnapped decent young children from cozy houses in London and consorted with a rather tidy little tart of a fairy named Tinkerbell. Peter Pan is an entirely bad influence on young boys and why it wasn’t banned years ago in the name of all that’s decent I’ll never know.

I also don’t know if kids still read Peter Pan or just watch the bowdlerized Disney film version of it. The latter seems more likely, as even children’s literature becomes a vehicle for instructing kids in the proper way to behave.

As witness to that stands a new book for children about the virtues of composting. Compost Stew, by Mary Mckenna Siddals, aims at teaching children to reduce waste while learning the alphabet– a noble, if not very entertaining thought.

Its alphabetized verse — "Just add to the pot/and let it all rot/into Compost stew" she says of things like apple cores and coffee grounds — is meant to edify and induct rather than entertain and educate.

Whatever happened to fun? Aren’t kids entitled to any of that anymore? If my older sister had approached me with a book extolling the virtues of composting instead of Peter Pan, I would have told her exactly what I thought it was — the kind of crap that can go into compost but can’t be spelled out in a family newspaper.

 

It’s musical beds in celebrity land

If you watch the television entertainment gossip show these days — shows such as The Insider or Entertainment Tonight — you might well come to the conclusion that you and your wife (and you can never actually really be too sure about her) are the only couple in the world who remain faithful to each other.

That’s probably not true, but there do seem to be a lot of celebrities boinking in the wrong beds. Tiger Woods comes immediately to mind, with his count of conquests approaching his golf score on a good day.

Tiger says he has reformed, that he has abandoned his wicked ways, and that might even be true. He was confident enough to appear at the Masters golf tournament in Augusta, Georgia, last weekend. Not that he’s any slouch in that department. He placed fourth on Sunday after playing just about his worst golf ever. If he, his wife Elin and golf fans can separate the profligate from the professional, there’s seems no doubt he’ll be back on top one day, one way or the other.

Canadian actor Jim Carrey this week learned that this is not a subject to be treated twittily after he posted a message on the Internet suggesting that Mrs. Woods was just as responsible as Mr. Woods for the problems in their marriage. "No wife is blind enough to miss that much infidelity," he Twittered, and that caused his fans to Splutter electronically and led gossip TV to the conclusion that the actor had finally gone completely bonkers.

Carrey, who recently Twittered to the world that he has split with his girlfriend of five years, kind of backtracked, even though he was only saying what almost everyone else was already thinking — how can anybody be that dumb?

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Academy Award-winning actress Sandra Bullock is in seclusion after learning that her husband, Jesse James, had cheated on her with several women, most notable among them tattoo model Michelle "Bombshell" McGee — oh, the indignity. What is a tattoo model anyway?

Adultery, if that’s not too strong a word — curiously, one hardly ever hears it used in this context — appears to be endemic. Even former television virgin Valerie Bertinelli has admitted in a recently published autobiography to cheating on her former husband, rock star Eddie Van Halen, who also cheated on her, making her a cuckquean and him a cuckold. Somehow, when you call things what they actually are, it takes some of the glamour out of something that’s actually sordid. Twitter us that, Mr. Carrey.

 

 one to watch…

KURMANBEK BAKIYEV, the deposed president of Kyrgyzstan, has retreated from the capital, Bishkek, to his home town in the south of the country. He is demanding guarantees of safety for himself and his extended family in return for his resignation. Back at the capital, the interim government is under pressure to put Bakiyev and his relatives on trial for the deaths that occurred during his overthrow, and there are rumblings of an operation to arrest them. None of this would be of much concern outside the borders of Kyrgyzstan, one of the Central Asian countries that emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union, except that the U.S. has a big air base in the country. It’s of critical importance for moving supplies into neighbouring Afghanistan, where the U.S. and its allies are waging a seemingly endless war. So important is the base that the air in Bishtek had barely cleared of cordite when the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State, Robert Blake, flew in for talks with the interim leader, Roza Otunbayev. One of Bakiyev’s fatal blunders was to promise Russia to cancel the lease on the base, and then to break his promise when the U.S. raised the yearly rent from $14 million to $67 million. Russia responded by tightening exports to Kyrgyzstan and the resulting leap in fuel costs brought the revolutionaries to the streets. Both Russia and the U.S. were keeping the rhetoric down for the time being, but Otunbayev looks to be in the same squeeze as the man she ousted — a pawn in the Great Game.