St. Patrick’s Day, 2024: First Bike Ride

A bit breezy and cold (6C), but sunny streets are dry enough to justify pumping up the tires.

Full circle. Riding the bike at 74 always takes me back to my Wallasey St., Winnipeg youth, after I got my old Eaton’s 3 speed glider in the summer of 1958. Went everywhere with that, delivering Tribune newspapers after school on my Wallasey-Thompson route, riding out to East Selkirk one weekend, to the old Winnipeg Arena on a school hr., to Assiniboine Park, and back to when I briefly did drugstore deliveries on snow-covered Portage Ave. in the winter.

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1965: Everything you need to know about Haiti and its gangs running amok

was described and prophesied by Graham Greene in this ‘unfunny’ novel nearly 60 years ago.

Again, a case of literature and writers (other e.g., Shakespeare, Yeats, Huxley, Orwell, Bradbury, et al) predicting the dark world we live in now.

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“Let ’em drive 2 hrs. to the crowded Red Deer hospital!”

Danielle Smith’s flippant solution/’answer’ to the desperate hospital shortage now that the promised city hospital won’t be built despite an ample budget.

(Queen Danielle’s middle finger\Marie Antoinette rejoinder to Edmonton and its populace)

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A Day to Celebrate: March 17!

(Daughter’s wabbit into the spirit of things)

(it’s all about the classic Irish folk tunes; 2 great CDs)

(Creme de menthe pie, an old favorite)

(Creme de menthe parfait, a decadent March 17 treat with ice cream; here, maxed out with Oreo ice cream)

The Ultimate St. Patrick’s Day Comedy-Fantasy

The Luck of the Irish, 1948 in black-and-white or tinted green (Irish sections-garish green, New York black-and-white).

A handsome Tyrone Power plays the perspicacious journalist Steven Fitzgerald, who, unknowingly encounters Horace, a leprechaun while visiting Ireland. Curious about the pookah, he briefly captures him to see his gold, but magnanimously lets him go, which puts the elf, played whimsically by Cecil Kellaway, into his permanent debt. Both he and Nora, the young woman Steve falls in love with in Ireland, end up coming to New York when Steve returns there to take a high-paying sell-out job with Augur (played by Lee J. Cobb), a control-freak newspaper-tycoon running for president, whom Steve disagrees with repeatedly and fundamentally.

Augur’s daughter Francis (played by Jayne Meadows (of The Honeymooners tv series) tries to capture Steve too, but you can guess the predictable outcome, aided by Steve’s new butler, played by Horace. The Irish accents of Horace, Nora, and her father will probably confute and mystify many viewers today. The music cues many of the changing emotional moods throughout the film, including an inappropriate “Greensleeves” (!), but keeps things playfully tuned and moving along.

The wry screenplay by Philip Dunne directed by Henry Koster are top-notch, and both Kellaway and Power are a delightful duo when together in their scenes. There is something special and magical about this oldie which still resonates today for anyone looking for a truly entertaining, delightful piece.

As a postscript, I would mention that Woody Allen obviously borrowed some of the basic conflicts from this classic for his last good movie Midnight in Paris with Hollywood standing in for New York and Paris standing in for Ireland.
Both are amusing, highly-recommended films.

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In actual fact, UCP is not just dismantling AHS,

they have neglected, ruthlessly dismantled and destroyed health care in the province.

And they are destroying family practice and driving out doctors in our province. Several doctors in our area are shutting down their practices this year, for instance.

Frankly, the only hope to bring back health care and family practice normalcy (if there’s anything left from the rubble) will be to vote in NDP in the next election.

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Process, Context, and Choice

Our lives and any moments or situations you care to name are simply a combination and interaction of three things: process, context, and choice. Life and its many episodes consisting of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months is nothing more than a process–a long series of never-ending moments that unfold in a person’s life. We talk of life process whether we are describing a man, a pelican, a tree, or the ocean. Process can be applied as a concept to many things: the history of a nation, a procedure such as a medical operation, or a stage in one’s life such as adolescence.

Context is simply the situation one finds oneself in whether one is a child in a day-care centre, a career woman encountering a “glass ceiling” in the work world, or a group of oppressed people within a repressive political regime. Context can be personal, social, political, religious, medical (as in the case of having an illness or condition), and so forth. Context is what we, as individuals, are presented with at any given moment, what we find ourselves in. Sometimes the context is familiar, as in waking up in the morning and making our breakfast. Sometimes it is unfamiliar or unstructured, as in when a concert-goer finds himself being pushed to the front of the stage by an enthusiastic crowd. All contexts frequently require response and choice, especially in the face of obstacles or crisis.

Confronted with the never-ending flow of our days and process, and the fact of similarly morphing contexts, we have but one way to respond—via choice. Some Existentialists suggested that the important thing in life was the fact of personal choice. Victor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist who wrote movingly of World War II concentration camp experiences, said much the same thing about those personal choices we will into being, especially in contexts of conflict and crisis.

To a large extent, our choices finally define us, whether they are ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ If you want to understand others, consider their choices and decisions. What do they choose to do? How have they chosen to live their lives? What other choices might they make or have made? And what, then, of our own choices? How and why do we choose as we do? What do those choices say about us, our values, and beliefs, and the unique individuals we all are? Understanding our choices can move us forward in our lives. As novelist George Eliot once said, “The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.”

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Auto Reflex/Remarkable Heroism

The 80-year-old do-gooder Red Deer man, who stopped to help a Vancouver Island woman having car trouble in the dark, then pushed her off the road as a vehicle careened directly toward them.

According to family comments, he was a very unselfish guy, the kind who holds store doors open for others.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                (In a world where more and more people seem to care only about themselves and much less about others–especially strangers, I wonder how common or rare this kind of heroism is today.)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Just a ‘small’ news item about the personal choices people make in emergencies and crises amidst unexpected, certain death.

In this case, an unselfish existential choice of a sudden highway hero in a strange land.

                                                                                                                                                                  In that instant, this man confirmed his core values, the record of his past life-choices, his essential altruistic nature, and made a personal choice that was firmly true to his nature, full of significant meaning and purpose fulfilled.

                                                                                                                                                                  In that blindingly fast, tragic accident, the man made an instinctive, truly heroic existential choice.

                                                                                                                                                                And, thus, an ordinary, yet significant human individual left behind his most indelible signature/mark on our absurd, unpredictable, and weirdly chaotic world.

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The Trump Tyrant Poem (as prophesied by Shelley)

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Why are the noses missing from Egyptian statues? | Kemet Expert
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Percy Bysshe Shelley at His Most Inspired: “To a Skylark” (1820)

Percy Bysshe Shelley | English Romantic Poet & Philosopher | Britannica

To a Skylark

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from Heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

In the golden lightning
Of the sunken sun,
O’er which clouds are brightening,
Thou dost float and run;
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.

The pale purple even
Melts around thy flight;
Like a star of Heaven,
In the broad day-light
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight.

Keen as are the arrows
Of that silver sphere,
Whose intense lamp narrows
In the white dawn clear,
Until we hardly see, we feel that it is there.

All the earth and air
With thy voice is loud,
As, when night is bare,
From one lonely cloud
The moon rains out her beams, and Heaven is overflowed.

What thou art we know not;
What is most like thee?
From rainbow clouds there flow not
Drops so bright to see,
As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.

Like a poet hidden
In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not:

Like a high-born maiden
In a palace-tower,
Soothing her love-laden
Soul in secret hour
With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower:

Like a glow-worm golden
In a dell of dew,
Scattering unbeholden
Its aërial hue
Among the flowers and grass which screen it from the view:

Like a rose embowered
In its own green leaves,
By warm winds deflowered,
Till the scent it gives
Makes faint with too much sweet those heavy-winged thieves.

Sound of vernal showers
On the twinkling grass,
Rain-awakened flowers—
All that ever was
Joyous, and clear, and fresh—thy music doth surpass.

Teach us, Sprite or Bird,
What sweet thoughts are thine:
I have never heard
Praise of love or wine
That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.

Chorus Hymeneal,
Or triumphal chant,
Matched with thine would be all
But an empty vaunt—
A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.

What objects are the fountains
Of thy happy strain?
What fields, or waves, or mountains?
What shapes of sky or plain?
What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?

With thy clear keen joyance
Languor cannot be:
Shadow of annoyance
Never came near thee:
Thou lovest: but ne’er knew love’s sad satiety.

Waking or asleep,
Thou of death must deem
Things more true and deep
Than we mortals dream,
Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?

We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

Yet if we could scorn
Hate, and pride, and fear;
If we were things born
Not to shed a tear,
I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.

Better than all measures
Of delightful sound,
Better than all treasures
That in books are found,
Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!

Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow
The world should listen then, as I am listening now.

………………………………..
Living on Earth: BirdNote®: Skylark – With Aretha Franklin
I still remember studying this poem in grade 12 (1967) and learning the many similes and metaphors. This remains one of the most beautiful, inspired, spiritual, lofty poems ever writ.
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Where would we all be without

common sense, rational and critical thinking, commonly accepted rules, decency, and the benefits of civilization, kindness, and looking out for others?

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