Five Thoughts

I have been coming up against deadlines for the last seven days or so, so I shall share five (more or less random) thoughts:

1.) If I were a politician or a person engaged in politics, I would be quite concerned about the incivility involved in suggesting that the Auditor General is in the backpocket of the federal Tories. Or in suggesting that Stephane Dion's campaign may have been funded by illegal money (a likely liable to which I won't link). I am always puzzled about why people who are upright, pure as the driven snow even, get involved politics when they believe it is otherwise full of bad, corrupt, crooked and manipulable people. I realize that it may be a dominant strategy to always slag your opponent as incompetent or unethical or worse, but in the end everyone loses when politics is debased. It kind of reminds me of two prisoners in separate interogation rooms...

2.) I have an abiding interest in immigration and asylum and how these issues sometimes affect politics and public opinion. As a tangent to this tangent, I ocassionally read literature on migrants or refugees. Like books by this guy. And of what I've read Zagajewski's Refugees is among the best (and I found it on a great blog).

3.) Speaking of literature, this is quite a good short story. And here is the movie.

4.) What of my motorbike, you ask? Safely stored away for winter? Alas, it is true. But the stars are aligning for a week's riding in Spain avec mon pere. I'll be riding a sport-touring bike for the first time, though about half displacement of my father's normal ride. But at least we'll both be renting the same bikes for this trip. Pictures shall be sure to follow. As will, I am sure, yawning from the crowd uninterested in bikes.

5.) The Jerdon's Courser is an amazing bird, though not because of its rather distinct if modest markings. Rather, it was long believed to be extinct until it was rediscovered in 1986. But, even today there likely less than 200 in the world, so ornothologists still know very little about it's behaviour. This relates to nothing but the truth that for many things there is a light that never goes out, even when we're certain it has.

And thus end my meagre offerings.