green

Well, if there were no gun stores nobody - criminals included - would be able to buy them, would they? This is the situation in Japan where guns are entirely illegal. Up here in Canada our criminals import them from south of the border. And what is with this smiley-face lunacy when one tries to edit??? It has been happening to all of us since our elegant new format came into existance. It's quite a pain in the dictionary! P.S. I think that I am pro-gin.:heh:

So you say that this is "LOL, uh, no." Well then, my bad, but I was under the impression that there really was quite a bit of info to be found there concerning the proper care and treatment of one's slaves. :phanvan My bad.

And yep, I agree. You always have an interesting point of view and the facts to back it up to pass along to the rest of us. :clap2: Keep on "blathering," grrl.

A further note on gun control: a letter to the editor published yesterday in The Globe and Mail (one of the Canada's two national newspapers) mentioned that the author had googled gun deaths by country and had discovered - no surprise - that stricter gun laws result in fewer deaths. In Japan, where gun ownership is illegal, the gun death rate in 1994 was 0.05 per 100,000 people. Canada's rate was 4.31 and the U.S. clocked in at 14.24. The writer, a Bruce MacDonald of Vancouver, passes along a few other interesting statistics which he had culled. About 5,000 American children under the age of 15 die annually due to gun-related activities; fatalities of this type are virtually unheard of in Japan. He also mentions that in those Canadian provinces where there are fewer gun-owning households, there are fewer gun-related fatalities. Is wide-scale ownership of guns by private citizens really necessary in the 21st century?

Oooh, well now you have got Green totally excited. You've said the magic word: Shopping!

Those are civilized words. Amen to all of the above.

Gadget, I find this argument disingenuous coming from a Christian. Your Holy Book does, afterall, look quite kindly on the practice of slavery, does it not?

I think that any woman who doesn't want a baby shouldn't be forced to have one. This is her decision to make. I also think that there should be a cap on the time during which she can make this decision. Leaving it until the moment when the foetus could live outside the womb as a preemie is leaving it too late unless there is a serious health consequence involved. Then the mother's rights must trump that of the foetus.

The mother's right to life trumps that of the foetus in my opinion.

I feel about the opposite sex the same way as you, BJean and Airwayman, do.

Yep, that would be my problem, too. Drinkies!:eek: I am losing weight but could be doing this at a much faster rate.:rolleyes Oh, yeah.....:eek:

This is a real nice thread. I note that you, Mrs. Husker, live in Omaha. When does your growing season start? I live in southern Ontario, Canada and there used to be a rule that we couldn't plant until the third weekend in May no matter how sweet the weather was. Global warming has changed that although we were experiencing winter until 3 PM yesterday. This is when the sun finally came out and the weather improved. The weather is great today. In fact my next door neighbour, a gardening genius, has put out her indoor plants, a sign that spring is officially here! I am a lazy gardener. My next door neighbour - a gardening genius - has taken over my front garden with my blessing and has made it an artistic extension of hers. I had planted some years back a couple of peonies, a lilac, and a rose bush in order to supplement the plants which were already there. She has since gone to town and our joint garden looks gorgeous throughout the good weather. Because the backyard has been given over to my basement tenant I confine myself to gardening in pots on my front porch. I like to grow flowers, herbs, and cherry tomatoes. In the fall I dry the herbs and continue to use them throughout the winter. My usual crop consists of thyme, basil, oregano and rosemary. I did try growing corriander once but it became woody almost immediately.

I find the size-thang very mysterious. Sizes don't appear to be all that standard. I have often had a sales clerk tell me that this manufacturer 'fits small' and that that line 'fits large.' This is why I am afraid to order clothes off the internet. I have the same problem with shoes, too. It really is a drag. I would love to go shopping in my pajamas, eh. bleh....:think

Yeah, I really loved the Folk, too, and was bummed when it ended.:cry Now I watch the L Word. I am glad that you enjoyed the Toronto episode but the truth is that the entire series was shot here. I have been in a couple of those bars with friends of mine. :biggrin1: One of them used to serve a fabulous Sunday breakfast.:hungry:

I agree with the above post. By the time an infant is ready to be born abortion should no longer be a viable option. The woman's body has already done most of the work of forming the the baby and she has known for a long, long time that she was pregnant. If she doesn't want the kid she can put it up for adoption. I am, however, entirely pro choice when it comes to a woman discovering that she is pregnant and she is still in the early stages of her pregnancy. I will offer my own case as an example: I had been sexually active since I was 19 years old and because I knew that I never wanted children I had always been meticulous about birth control. When I was 32 years old I discovered that I was pregnant and immediately arranged for an abortion. I was about 6 weeks along at the time, I reckon. As for this story of hard core feminists encouraging women to get pregnant in order to have abortions, well, that is just a very vicious story floated by right-wing fundamentalist groups. Women, whether they are right or left wing in their politics, straight or gay, hold similar attitudes about the business of making a baby. No sane woman is going to counsel another woman to enter into a pregnancy solely in order to endure an abortion in order to make a political point. Feminists love children, too. In fact the thrust of the women's movement was to elevate the status of women so that they might stand on an equal footing with men. In the early days of the movement, feminists were concerned with securing the right to vote. Another civil liberty which women did not have was the right to manage their own property; the control of their wealth rested in the hands of their husbands or nearest male relatives. Along with fighting for these civil liberties were those issues associated with reproduction. There had been advances made in the technology of birth control but access to these materials were usually unavailable to women; sometimes these materials were illegal or proscribed. Margaret Sanger was one of the pioneers in this area, by the way. Let's get real. Women were having abortions long before they became legal. Wealthy or middle class women were usually able to pay off a doctor who may have known what he was doing. Poor women more often ended up with ruined insides or dying. Those feminists and many other folks too felt that the state of affairs with respect to abortion at that time was ridden with hypocrisy and, more importantly, was dysfunctional. (I would also argue that it was the women's movement which took away the shame from unmarried motherhood. Yep, now an unmarried and pregnant woman really does have the choice of carrying her child to term and raising it without shame.) I am pro-choice but I do think that there must be a time limit on the period in which a woman gets to exercise her options. If the woman is far enough along that her foetus has become a viable creature who could well be considered a preemie, well then, she has already made her choice, hasn't she?

Why don't you get married in a semi-exotic foreign country? Canada has legalized same sex marriage and the U.S. version of Queer as Folk was shot in my home town, Toronto. In fact that is the same neighbourhood where our Pride parade ends up turning into a giant street festival. The Pride parade has become a big deal in Toronto; around 3 quarters of a million people turn up for the parade. Many more people are interested in the Pride festivities than in the jazz festival which runs concurrently.

I always enjoy reading Mark Steyn. Thanks for posting this, Jack.

To tell you the truth the psychological environment north of the border with respect to gun ownership is entirely different. Canadians are not accustomed to welcoming fire arms into our lives even though we are now aware that gun ownership is filtering into our criminal element. We are accustomed to living in a fairly peaceful and structured environment and we operate on the assumption that our self-elected government and our judiciary and police will act in a transparent in fashion, one that will serve us, the people. Of course these bodies do not always do this and may display themselves, sooner or later, as being corrupt. Canada does find itself going through periods of turmoil which do hinge on corruption in one or another area of state governance.

Oh, um, erg.... This is the way I once explained sex stuff to a boyfriend of mine who got kind of funny about some of my gay friends. I explained this issue of sexual orientation to him as as ultimately boiling down to a very simple question: What gets you excited? If it is the same sex equipment that you have, then you are gay and if it ain't, well then, you ain't.

No! My big mouth sarcastic tongue was firmly planted somewhere.....or other. I am a vexed woman who often finds it difficult to steer a tidy course, one of being politickally sensitive and thus one of carefully demanding civil freedoms for my neighbours in these increasingly complicated times. The truth is that the personal cranky runt of my own sweet self would like to tell these cabbies that they have chosen to a) opt to live in America and make their fortune by cabbying as a living. They have now chosen to set up caveats which would be functional had they either a) opted for another career path or chosen to live in an Islamic society. The cranky Green would like to say this: When in Rome you must do as the Romans do; this means that you have made yer bed and now you must lie in it! For the simple truth is this, it is true that those of us who live in the privileged countries and who do dress to the left, that is to say, those of us who are interested in you and who are anxious to welcome you into our home, still do feel that the care, engagement, respect and the love between us, the new-comer and the dreamy-eyed left-wing-nut, are going to have to meet, it's going to have to be a two-way street.

Both TommyO and I live in Canada where not only are the gun laws very, very strict but where gun ownership has never become part of our culture. This is an attitude which is much more in alignment with the attitudes (and laws) prevalent in England and in continental Europe. While all English speaking Canadians have grown up on American culture - American TV, movies, etc (the Canuck stuff was just so boring and second rate in comparison, eh) - the actual ownership of guns has never, ever formed part of our culture. Our parents didn't have them and none of our friends' parents had 'em either. And you certainly didn't see them for sale in urban stores. Nope, as far as I can gather, the gun thang remained the exclusive purview of cops, farmers, ranchers, the military, and gun enthusiasts. It is still difficult to get a gun in Canada unless you are a criminal. I have still, at the age of 57, never handled a gun! None of my friends have 'em. Our criminals get their guns from across the border. A lot of our new and up-coming criminals are juveniles who belong to gangs. These kids are school drop-outs and are are part of the culturally and racially alienated young. They tend to act like morons and it is difficult to maintain a politically sensitive attitude towards a group of individuals who are so seemingly anxious to destroy themselves. Nevertheless, these kids are professionals in their own way, as are the other chief groups of gun owners inside this country. For sure these kids do shoot each other up and they have certainly inflated the mortality figures for my city, the City of Toronto. But the mortality rates from gunfire in this country are still extraordinarily low compared to those in America. This is because most of us have never seen a working gun let alone have access to one. And those of us who do carry guns are professionals; they realise that they are tools of the trade or they are busy shooting each other up over gangland territory issues. Of course this is not to say that an innocent is never harmed by a gun. It is to say that guns are not easily available in this country. This would mean that much of our violence is of a more intimate nature. When Canadians want to kill each other we have to strangle or knife each other. What this means is that, although we do have gun deaths in this country, the overall body count is far, far lower. From what I have read so far about this tragic business, the young man who performed these dreadful acts was seriously emotionally ill and had been identified as a troubled soul by any number of individuals for a long, long time. He had been noted as such by a number of teachers and by fellow students but all of these individuals were under the same set of restraints, were they not? What could they have done even if they could have found themselves together and in one place and able to trade stories of this individual's weird and disturbing behaviour? We live under civil laws which seek to protect the individual and his rights - even the eccentric or artistic individual - but these same laws also, and tragically so, serve to protect the rights of those individuals who by their actions are later proved to be unacceptable to us as a society. It is true that people who come from countries which are less gun-friendly than the U.S. have issues with your country's current approach to gun ownership. We don't git it! Nope, not at all. Certainly it is true that firearm ownership made sense at the point when America was being colonised and the issue of the right to bear arms made sense within the framework of America's choice to withdraw from the economic oppression of its colonial masters. The statement of the ability to protect the freedom of this newly born country and the right of each individual to bear arms in order to defend this country made sense within the framework of the era. But let's get real, eh. The 21st century does not belong to cowboys and goofs who keep loaded guns in their night tables. There is no longer any reason why firearms should be freely available to anyone other than farmers, ranchers, cops, military, and gun hobbyists. There is certainly no reason why anyone outside of the police or the military should have access to semi- or fully automatic weapons. This is just fucken dumb and it is criminal.

I've been thinking about this issue for awhile and I have come to believe that it is more complicated than it may initially appear. Certainly Christians want to be assured of certain personal rights which have to do with their freedom to worship their God and those of us who are atheists are anxious that all civil rights be left free and clear of any infringement by any type of religious belief. In theory the answer should be simple: devout folks practice their beliefs privately when amongst themselves. Public places, such as schools, are left neutral; prayer, for example, is an activity that can be contained to church and home, as indeed can all references to God. Nevertheless, civilized western countries like to think that they are operating on rational and generous principles and that there is room for many different voices. I initially found the Muslim cabbies to be hypocritical in their stand on transporting passengers carrying alcohol. This was not because they were refusing the booze but because they were refusing to have their cabs carry some sort of identifying insignia - the different top light in this case - which would indicate to potential clients that their cars were dry cars. I still think that the logic in their reply to this suggestion is bizarre, and am surprised that the public's reaction to this tidy idea was negative. The only reason I can see for these cabbies being wary of being identifiable is that there is anti-Muslim sentiment which pervades much of Europe and America. Why buy further trouble, eh? What I would advise doing in this situation is kinda simple: Most of us call it lying. Repeat after Green: No sir, I do not carry alcohol with me.

Yep, I'm curious too, BJean!

Green thinks there is such an item. she is under the impression that her father may have been issued them at one time during his battle with prostate cancer. Of course Green's only patch experience has been with the nicotine kind and she only uses them when she is on an airplane.:phanvan And BJean, if such a thing does exist and I can git 'em, you will be the first on my speed dial. :)

My husband wore a big red blushing face and I wore attitude. As we were walking right behind the naked guys I figured no one would be paying any attention to us. The way it all came about was that my tenant is a lesbian who works for one of the five national Canadian banks and the bank wanted to show a friendly corporate presence on Pride Day. Now, Pride Day has become a huge festival in our city and over 3 quarters of a million people come out to party so the mayor of the city and various corporations like to make their presence known. Anyhow, the bank called for volunteers to march in the parade and got the following: my tenant, a gay friend of hers who does not work for the bank, my husband and myself, a straight Vietnamese woman who does work for the bank, her nine year old daughter and her older sister who was in town visiting her but who normally lives in Australia.