Why I drag my feet

I drag my feet over all kinds of shit.

Just as a for instance, I've had my doctor hounding me about a colonoscopy for years. Ain't gonna happen. There are just some things you don't have to know. If my bowels are indeed consuming themselves from the inside out, what good does it do to know this?

Sure, you could "take measures."

That tends to involve hugely invasive medical procedures that will a) make the payments on my doctor's BMW for several years, and b) completely destroy my quality of life.

So I'll take the quality of life, and the quality of mine is pretty damned good, thank you very much.

Just this afternoon me and the Farm Manager were sitting out in front of the barn, out of the wind. Every now and then a car goes by, but most of the time all you hear is the wind in the trees and the birds singing to one another.

Once in awhile an airplane flies over. I've used the Flight Tracker website enough now to know roughly where they're coming from and where they're going.

The northwest to southeast flights are usually heading to Toronto from points west in Canada.

The southwest to northeast flights are usually heading to Europe from somewhere in middle America. From Chicago to virtually any European destination takes you right over Falling Downs. So does Los Angeles to Zurich or London. Those are the ones where you wonder who's on that airplane.

It's not just passenger jets flying over. This afternoon I saw a red-tail hawk swing by with a couple of small birds in hot pursuit. They were mightily pissed, and Mr. Hawk was doing his best to evade them, without a lot of luck.

Quality of life.

Not much in my Globe and Mail today. Paul Waldie brought me up to speed on that French election. Apparently the far-left fringe candidate Melenchon is a communist and wants to align France with Venezuela. That's the take on the French election from Canada's newspaper of record.

I pity the poor folks who rely on the Globe for their news. They don't actually send Waldie to Europe to "research" this shit, do they? That was about as lame a take on the French election as anyone could possibly imagine. An unpaid intern with an interest in politics could easily put together a more informative article from a computer terminal in their local public library in Toronto.

If you want some insight into the election in France, don't read the Globe and Mail, read this instead.

Chloe is the real reason I drag my feet. She's the cat I got out of the clinic where Karla Homolka worked. She's got to be twenty years old by now. She has outlived all the dogs we've ever owned; Buddy, Charlie, Gus, Roxy, Peaches... and she's on track to outlive the two hounds at Falling Downs today, Boomer and Lucy.

For the first fifteen years of our life together she studiously avoided me. The last few years she's really warmed up, to the point where she follows me around from morning till night. She's literally under my feet every moment of the day.

I drag my feet to avoid stepping on her.

Tomorrow we're off to the city to move Junior out of residence at U of T. He's studying economics...

Where did I go wrong?

Hollande gets cold shower in municipal elections

Hollande the Conqueror may be a hero in the CAR and Mali, but he's toxic in France.

The big winners in the municipal elections are allegedly the centre-right main opposition, but read between the lines and it's obvious that the real winners are the once-marginalized National Front.

We've said it before and we'll say it again; once the mainstream left makes itself irrelevant, the fringe right will pick up the pieces.

National Front is long past being on the fringes. The roots of the far right go deep in France. Yes, there is a substantial "silent majority" that will be in denial about that forever, but look at the election results and tell me who is in the ascendancy.

A big part of the reason is that the left cannot seem to come up with viable candidates who capture the imagination of the people. What did Hollande ever have to offer?

Those with even a marginal appreciation for the difference between left and right would have been putting their eggs in the Melenchon basket two years ago.

The wimpy radicalism of the NDP

Andrea Horwath wants to shift more of the financial burden of our fight to slay the deficit onto the "super-rich".

But she doesn't want to give offence.

So she's suggesting a 2% surcharge on folks earning over a half million a year.

Far from not giving offence, that confiscatory two percent earned her a scathing rebutal in the Globe.

Contrast that to the proposal put forward by Left Front Presidential candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon in France.

How about a 100% surcharge on everything over half a million bucks?

Obviously he's not concerned with giving offence!