Ouch. Canadian politics are a scary joke.
RMR: Rick’s Rant - Harper’s Census
Haha, I wonder if our old friend Stephen ever watches these.
RMR: Rick’s Rant - Region against Region
If you’re not from the prairie, you can’t know my soul,
You don’t know our blizzards, you’ve not fought our cold.
You can’t know my mind, nor ever my heart,
Unless deep within you, there’s somehow a part…
A part of these things that I’ve said that I know,
The wind, sky and earth, the storms and the snow.
Best say you have - and then we’ll be one,
For we will have shared that same blazing sun.
You don’t know our blizzards, you’ve not fought our cold.
You can’t know my mind, nor ever my heart,
Unless deep within you, there’s somehow a part…
A part of these things that I’ve said that I know,
The wind, sky and earth, the storms and the snow.
Best say you have - and then we’ll be one,
For we will have shared that same blazing sun.
— David Bouchard, If you’re not from the prairie…
What sets a canoeing expedition apart is that it purifies you more rapidly and inescapably than any other. Travel a thousand miles by train and you are a brute; pedal five hundred on a bicycle and you remain basically a bourgeois; paddle a hundred in a canoe and you are already a child of nature.
For it is a condition of such a trip that you entrust yourself, stripped of your worldly goods, to nature. Canoe and paddle, blanket and knife, salt pork and flour, fishing rod and rifle; that is about the extent of your wealth. To remove all the useless material baggage from a man’s heritage is, at the same time, to free his mind from petty preoccupations, calculations and memories.
— Pierre Elliot Trudeau, 15th Prime Minister of Canada, published in 1944. View the full essay here.
RMR: Rick’s Rant for March 17, 2010 - Double Standard
Herbicide Turns Male Frogs into Females
Source: The Globe and Mail
Researchers in the United States say they have turned male frogs into females by exposing the amphibians to tiny amounts of atrazine, a weed killer widely used on corn fields in Canada and often found in water supplies in agricultural areas.
The chemically induced sex change occurred by dosing frogs at concentrations of the herbicide 50 per cent below Health Canada’s guideline for drinking water.
Grizzly Bears Move into Polar Bear Territory, Threatening Polar Cubs
Two of the world’s largest land carnivores are converging on the same territory, according to data recently published in Canadian Field Naturalist. Grizzly bears (Ursus arctos horribilis) are moving into an area that has long been considered prime polar bear habitat in Manitoba, Canada. Although polar bears (Ursus maritimus) are bigger than their grizzly relatives—they are the world’s largest land carnivores—biologists are concerned that grizzlies will kill polar cubs, further threatening the polar bear, which is already thought to be imperiled by ice loss in the Arctic.
Before the sightings, researchers had assumed that grizzlies would be unable to pass the barren landscape north of the Hudson Bay. But now that they have passed that gap, they are in an area sporting caribou, moose, fish, and berries.
“We don’t yet know if they are wandering or staying—the proof will come from an observed den or cubs—these animals will eventually be residents of this national park,” says Rockwell. “The Cree elders we talked to feel that now that grizzly bears have found this food source they will be staying.”
RMR: The Harper Method
