The SPCA doesn’t receive any government help. All of its 3.7M$ budget comes from donations. With the number of animals they have to care for each year, that translates into 32 cents per animal per day. They receive 30-40 complaints per day about cruelty to animals in Montreal. There are only 3 investigators to look into them. Quebec has 8 animal cruelty inspectors, while Ontario has 247. Even when they do find evidence of cruelty, there is insufficient legislation here to get it to stop.

I think when I adopt my pet there in the next month or so, I think I’ll volunteer some time as well.

…God knows there’s plenty reason to do so.

Our dear own Premier Landry says “Never again will the Quebec nation lose a referendum on its national sovereignty”.

And in order to ensure this, it seems there are lots and lots of referendums ahead, should the PQ be re-elected… including one to give 16- and 17-year-olds the right to vote.

Maudite gang de voleurs.

(link via Kate)

This weekend T and I went on a DVD shopping spree. Among the movies I picked up was Emma. Emma, based on the famous 1816 book by Jane Austen, one of England’s most popular and beloved authors.

A year before the movie Emma came out, the utterly forgettable movie Clueless was released. Clueless is based on the story of Emma, but in a Beverly Hills 90210 setting. Imagine spoiled rich valley girls in convertibles, trying to match their friends up while sipping grande lattés at swanky coffee bars. Actual quote: “That’s Ren and Stimpy. They’re way existential.” It’s a bit of an abomination, but not totally unclever in its adaptation of the book.

What does it say on the back of the Emma DVD? “Based on the story that inspired the movie Clueless!!!” Appallingly, no mention of Jane Austen. How’s that for short-sighted marketing? Who will remember “My mother died in a freak accident during a routine liposuctioning” Clueless fifty years from now?

There are people there, you know…

I saw this anti-drug coalition commercial last night: two teenage boys are sitting in what seems to be the plush home office of one of their parents. One is sitting at the desk, the other in an easy chair. They’re smoking pot and obviously quite stoned - mellow, slow, slurring their words. You wonder where this is going until one of them opens the top drawer and pulls out a gun. Not realizing what it is, he holds it weakly towards his friend. Completely relaxed, his glassy-eyed friend asks if the gun’s loaded, and the other kid inadvertently shoots him.

The word “HARMLESS?” comes on the screen, meaning the marijuana.

Does it strike anyone else as perverted, that pot is shown as the harmful thing here, when there’s a loaded gun in the unlocked top drawer? Are they saying this is a normal thing to have in one’s house?

A brilliant little movie to incite Americans to vote.

Today is Ste-Catherine’s day, patron saint of old maids like me. Apparently, old Catherine converted to Christianity after having a vision and debated some pagan philosophers, converting many in the process with her great rhetoric. Traditionally, the day is associated with making taffy (tire, or “pull”), and I read that this is because poor Catherine was pulled on a wheel during her martyrdom. Another version says the wheel was destroyed as soon as she touched it, so they beheaded her instead. Yet another version has it that Catherine angered the emperor Maximus by refusing to marry him.

In the early days in the French Canadian colony, a feast was held on November 25th, where taffy was made and single women could meet eligible men, in order to be married in time for the holidays.

Yes, there was a time when it was that simple.

Good old Dubya has nixed a project approved by Congress to spend 34 million $ on women’s health in foreign countries. This project would have promoted contraception in the third world and worked against the spread of AIDS and the practice of genital mutilation. Oh, and by the way, he wants to spend 135 million $ domestically on promoting abstinence.

Fine. But George also wants to appoint W. David Hager as chairman of the Food and Drug Administration’s panel on women’s health policy. Hager is a gynecologist who will not prescribe the pill to unmarried women, will not insert IUDs or perform abortions. He is working towards having the FDA’s approval for the abortion pill reversed.

That’s not even the kicker. According to Hager, the man who could be making policy about women’s health, a good cure for PMS is reading the Bible. I’d like to see him try that at a women’s prison, where the inmates’ cycles are all synchronized.

I’m going to see Bowling for Columbine tonight, so I’m pretty sure my opinion of American policy isn’t about to improve.

(Thanks for the link Gene)

183 dead (so far) in a blast in Kuta, Bali. 7 dead in Helsinki.

Indonesia and Finland are about as different as two beautiful places can be. I have visited and been in love with both. Over the past week I’ve been vaguely concerned for my welfare here in Caracas, and more worried about my upcoming trip to the Washington, D.C. area. These concerns have made me slightly more anxious to be home.

But now, I see beloved, familiar places on the news, the sites of violence and death. I find that extremely disturbing; it’s like a line has been crossed. Bali? Finland? I realize the two incidents have nothing to do with each other, but still it makes me think that there is no safe place.

Nevertheless, I’ll still probably feel much better in Montreal (Wednesday night, cross your fingers), but let’s not be naive: this is everyone’s problem.

Recently, Treefen asked me in a comment what I mean when I describe myself as a disillusioned environmentalist. Although I’ve thought about the environment a lot, I’m not done thinking about it, so my current position is still full of contradictions. However you asked, so here goes.

My father raised me to be very outdoorsy, and I grew up very much a tree-hugger. I started a neighborhood ecology club at age 9. At age 20, I organized a clean-up day for an abandoned field in my town. The mayor showed up, and there was much rejoicing.

I think the problem with my attitude back then was that I eventually wanted things to be not better, but perfect. I was hoping we’d clean everything up (atmosphere and lithosphere), invent completely green technologies that would maintain the ecosystem in a constantly balanced and self-replenishing state. Eventually, we’d only use energy and resources that are completely sustainable.

Well that’s nice.

But then in university, I started a degree in Ecology, and that’s when it happened. I became keenly aware of exactly how dire the planet’s situation is, and how my idea of ecological perfection could never realistically be. It was like being placed in the total perspective vortex. I realized that even if everyone in the world instantly became enviro-conscious, we could probably only slightly slow the decline.

Now, this is where I come off sounding horrible. The urgency of the situation didn’t increase my motivation, but rather I started thinking that all this time I’d been cleaning up after everyone else, but that nobody cared, or cared enough, for it to make any sort of significant difference. I wasn’t sure I really wanted to spend my life fighting a losing battle, feeling unhappy, desperate, angry, frustrated at everyone else for happily consuming, but eventually wasting my breath.

So I switched programs from Ecology to Biology. And my advisor’s exact words were “Shame on you”.

Am I totally anti-environment? Of course not. But right now I’m just doing the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle thing in my own life, cleaning up after myself, trying to minimize my personal contribution to the problem. But I’m not comfortable with this. It’s not enough.

I’m still trying to find a comfortable position and level of involvement in the matter. I’m wrestling with the fact that the more involved I am, the more frustrated I become with the situation. Being this little involved doesn’t feel right either. So I’m strangely schizophrenic on the issue.

Someone asked me a year ago, if I was stranded on a desert planet with 100 children, and had to help them establish a new society, what would I teach them? Truth first, but then respect for nature, humility towards the animals and plants they eat, the ground they tread.

I wish we could start over.