Latent Terror of the North

Hillary Clinton says the situation in Pakistan is:

as though on our Canadian border there were terrorists who were coming across the border and we let them have Washington and then we let them have Montana and then we said, well, you know, not very many people live in the Dakotas, they’re not near Chicago or New York . . .

While I was wondering whether to be offended by this, I read this article on Rakesh Saxena, a wheeler-dealer whom Canada finally managed to extradite to Thailand yesterday:

He also managed to embarrass us internationally by plotting a military coup in Sierra Leone while in custody at the police lock-up at 222 Main Street. After news of the planned coup leaked to the media, which forced him to cancel his plan, he cheekily told reporters there was nothing in the terms of his detention preventing him from plotting coups in foreign countries. The embarrassing part was that he was right.

Okay, so maybe it's not Canadians Madam Secretary is worried about so much as all the other people in Canada, who are let in with relative ease and sometimes hang around for years. I know, I was one of them.

Still. She could have picked a less stable country bordering the U.S. I really don't think there are many people here, no matter how fanatical, who want to conquer the Dakotas.

Sap of Yesteryear

"Cane sugar and Vermont maple syrup"? But I thought that, in the good old days before I was born (the 50s and before, in other words), everybody feasted on pure maple syrup that cost scarcely more than tap water. And it came in bigger bottles, and the Revenue cutters were slow -- wait, that was rum.

From Dover.

Forget that old Lorelei . . .

Watch out for the treacherous Radiana Maidens as they lure you into the fatal world of cigar smoking.

Yes, it's a cigar label.

Phish Phry with a side of Spam

I seem to be getting less spam since Operation Phish Phry wound up, but a few spammers out there are still trying to scare me into opening their messages. Sadly for them, I don't scare easily; I get nervous easily, but that's different.

Let's see:

• "You're in blacklisted IP lsit (sic)". Coming from someone like you, that's a good thing.
• "Unpleasant news". I know -- you're not going to stop this till I open one.
• "Big deal". Here we have something that may be trying to scare me, or just convince me that this is, you know, a big deal.
• "Terrifying kid". I'll put my two up against him anytime.

I knew it wasn't just because I was the oldest

Some things haven't changed since I was a girl:

by the time they're 10 years old, girls are doing more chores around the house than boys . . . girls in this latest study spent an average of 50 minutes more on chores each week than boys.

Supposedly, I was "better able" to do challenging tasks like dusting our ugly end tables. Well, I'll admit that, as the big sister, I thought I was the only one who really knew how to do anything right. Still, some things don't have to be done exactly right -- they just have to be done.

It goes on:

"We expected that as a generation or two of women have gone out into the labour force, the gender differences would have faded in their children, but that's not happening."

No, it takes more than a generation or two to get over the deep-rooted idea that the males have to save their energy for plowing the fields, chopping down trees, and doing anything that involves getting shot at.

Not quite in time for the Day of Atonement, but . . .

We live in an unlikely world.

Awhile back, Jon Stewart said the story of "el presidente Gutterball" going bowling on his birthday was about as believable as President Ahmadinejad spending his birthday seeing Fiddler on the Roof.

Now we get this.

Okay, he still probably wouldn't go to see Fiddler on the Roof.

But, to paraphrase Barbara Kay, "please don't call him a self-hating Jew; he adores himself."

Photo: Office of the President of Indonesia