Packing up boxes of old stuff that I haven’t even looked at in years inevitably caused the nostalgia to kick in. So maybe that’s why I was so excited when I stumbled on Emily Jones’ list of her favourite books that she read as a child. All the classics are on there, and Emily got the idea from a discussion with friends Sheila and Dan, both of whom have pretty steller lists themselves. Sheila’s list in particular reminded me of some of the books I used to love, but had totally forgotten about.
I always loved to read. Books were my candy. I would painstakingly save up my allowance every week to make a trip to the neighbourhood bookstore for new titles. That bookstore is gone now – a victim to the superstore phenomenon of Chapters/Indigo – but then, it was the kind of place where the salespeople knew me and had recommendations set aside every time I walked in. I would read my favourite books until they were in tatters, committing them to memory.
So I figure I gotta put together my own list, but I know I’ll leave so many out and I’ll probably have to add them once people remind me:
- The Kit Pearson books: “The Daring Game”, “A Handful of Time”, and the “Norah” series – about a young girl and her brother sent from England to Canada as “war guests” during WWII.
- From Anna by Jean Little, about a German girl who immigrates to Canada with her family, and the sequel “Listen for the Singing”. Jean Little also wrote a bunch of other favourites, including “Mine for Keeps” and “Home From Far”.
- The Babysitters’ Club series – all of them, until I got too old for them. I could quote from them. Literally. It was scary.
- The Root Cellar by Janet Lunn, about a girl named Rose who was transported back in time to the Civil War.
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee – a classic, of course.
- the “Booky” trilogy by Bernice Thurman Hunter, about her childhood growing up in Ontario during the Great Depression.
- Centre Stage– I can’t remember who the author is on this one, but it was about a little girl named Jenny who wanted to be a ballerina and attended the country’s most prestigious school in Toronto. The movie “Center Stage” a couple of years ago was clearly based loosely on this book, but they made the characters older and moved the story to the States, and though I looked high and low, I couldn’t find any mention of the book in the movie’s credits.
- A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith – another classic.
- The Secret Garden and A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Both were made into movies, plays, and all sorts of other forms. The original books are still better.
- All of the Lois Duncan books – she wrote about the supernatural, and her books scared the hell out of me. Some of them still do.
- The “Ramona” series by Beverly Cleary. Thanks to the lists above for reminding me. To this day, I never hear the Star-Spangled Banner without thinking of the special kind of lamp, “the dawnzer lee light”.
- Emily of New Moon by L.M. Montgomery. Anne of Green Gables is more famous, but I liked Emily better.
- The “All-of-a-kind-Family” series by Sydney Taylor, about a Jewish family with five kids growing up in the Lower East Side of New York at the turn of the (last) century. Thanks to Sheila for reminding me of these.
- Sheila also listed Katherine Paterson’s “Bridge to Terabithia” which was a great book, and reminded me of one of my other favourites by Paterson, “Lyddie”.
- Dicey’s Song and the rest of the Dicey series by Cynthia Voigt.
- No Promises in the Wind by Irene Hunt, about a teenaged boy who leaves home to make it on his own with his little brother during the Depression.
- The Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Especially the earlier books in the series, when Laura and Mary were growing up.
There are so many more and I’ll probably add to this post as I think of them. But this trip down memory lane’s been fun… feel free to join in.
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Believe it or not, traditionally anti-Israel CBC has hired Irshad Manji as a commentator on The National:
. . . and the debut of someone who will be contributing some Point of View commentaries for us in the weeks ahead — writer and broadcaster, Irshad Manji.
Judith, in a comment at LGF, wonders if someone at CBC read Manji’s bio but forgot to read her resume:
I’m stunned, I’m amazed, I’m astounded, I’m shocked. How did the CBC allow one of Canada’s finest anti-idiotarian on their airwaves to speak as a regular!?!
Well my husband says its because she’s Muslim, she’s a lesbian, she’s a woman, in other words she’s perfect for CBC, except that someone forgot to actually read what she says. This evenings talk was about how anti-Americanism is stupid. Wow! A pigs flying moment!
If only my TV were hooked up… I would’ve loved to see that.
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There’s been another suicide bombing in Israel. A female Palestinian suicide bomber blew herself up at a Gaza checkpoint, murdering at least four Israelis, in a case that yet again displays how every attempt by the Israelis to extend courtesies to the Palestinians is exploited and thrown back in their faces:
Brig.-Gen. Gadi Shamni told reporters that the woman evaded metal detectors by claiming she had platinum insets in her legs.
Shamni said she was taken to a side office and then fell over, the Jerusalem Post reported. When soldiers rushed to her help, she blew herself up.
“Because she was a woman, a female soldier was sent for, to inspect her. The terrorist made use of the waiting period for the arrival of the woman soldier, made her way further into the complex, and exploded,” Shamni said.
You can imagine how the human rights groups would scream if, heaven forbid, a male soldier were to inspect women who set off metal detectors. How could they deny the terrorists these valuable loopholes to claim more innocent lives?
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Blogging is light at the moment, and probably will be for most of the week, because I’m in the process of moving and I don’t yet have Internet at home. Normal posting should resume shortly.
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It’s FRIGGIN’ FREEZING out there!!!
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A Gazette reader has this to say about the widespread availability of porn on Canadian TV:
Evidently, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is less rigorous in regulating Canadian viewers’ access to porn (Gazette, Jan. 4., “Canada leads world in TV porn”) than in allowing Canadians the opportunity to pay for Fox or NBC’s 24-hour news channels. I am not particularly concerned with how the CRTC regulates pornography, but I cannot help but observe Canadian identity is deemed to be more symbiotic with pornography than American cable news availability.
One can only hope that the CRTC is properly vigilant in assuring porn actors and productions are Canadian and reflect our diverse, multi-cultural mosaic.
The CRTC’s recent decisions to deny broadcasting licenses to several US channels including HBO, Showtime, Starz, Cinemax, TMN, Lifetime, Flix, Fox Sports, ESPN, Fox News, Nickelodeon, and WAM were taken on the premise that they would “compete with existing Canadian channels”, and presumably that would be bad:
Further, the Commission’s general policy with respect to such requests precludes the distribution of non-Canadian services that it determines to be either totally or partially competitive with existing Canadian specialty or pay services.
The Commission notes that, under its current policy, a range of foreign programming services is available for distribution in Canada. Moreover, a number of broadly-distributed Canadian programming services provide a wide variety of non-Canadian programming, including programming available within the services that CCTA requests be authorized for distribution.
[ . . . ]
Most significantly, the Commission is concerned that adoption of CCTA’s proposal would make it more difficult for Canadian services to obtain the Canadian rights to broadcast foreign productions. The loss of the revenues generated by such foreign programs could result in a decrease in the production and broadcast of Canadian programming.
So we can’t get HBO because CTV would lose money when it tried to broadcast episodes of the Sopranos that are three years old. But no worries: we can have all the porn we could possibly dream of! I guess there aren’t too many concerns about preserving Canadian culture and preventing American competition when hot naked chicks are involved. (So then why is Sex and the City still not permitted to air?)
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David Janes defends bloggers:
One of the things I enjoyed about the blogosphere [is the] commitment [of] most of the bloggers I read to “anti-idiotarianism”, a commitment to truth even if it doesn’t promote their narrow political prejudices. Many of the top-tier warbloggers were Democrats, not out-of-the-closet unreformed Neanderthals. Check it out, if you need to. And it’s just not a case of “conservatives are liberals who have been mugged”: there’s a great diversity of opinion, civil debate and politic belief within the blogosphere, because there’s a basic commitment to the non-distortion of reality and the truth.
We’ll never have a “vibrant new global thinking process” if one’s concept of debate is to declare “blue is red” just because some guy you hate mentioned the colour of the sky the other day.
I’m not entirely convinced that bloggers are necessarily more honest or “committed to the truth” than mainstream journalists, professional writers, politicians, or the average guy on the street. Blogging is a tool. Like any other tool, it can be used to educate, provoke, spew nonsense, or (in my case) spout off.
In its infancy, blogging was perhaps “purer”, in the sense that most blogs were individuals writing on their own time and budget, as opposed to some of the big blogs we see now that have emerged into moneymaking careers. (Note to readers: that’s obviously not the case here.) In addition, bloggers are generally not journalists with professional training and a research staff. It’s extraordinarily easy for just about anyone to set up a blog, and they can just as readily be used to spread lies, propaganda, and disinformation. If a sort of “anti-idiotarian” courtesy emerged in the blogosphere, it is only because people decided that they want to be good neighbours and play by the rules. But blogging is just as open to abuse as any other medium, and perhaps more so. And with the emerging of a few major blogs that dictate the sphere, it seems that the rest of us mortals have been reduced to begging for scraps… or the ever-coveted link from Instapundit to generate Instatraffic.
That said, I think it’s illogical to lament the fact that someone is blogging a different point of view from yours. With so much going on out there, the only way to really figure anything out and have opinions is to read a wide variety of opinions, often dissenting ones. And blogs have made that much easier.
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This tidbit comes, rather appropriately, via Balagan:
The Interior Ministry has a list of 137 nationalities, including Abkhazi, Assyrian and Samaritan – but you won’t find “Israeli” among them. The State of Israel doesn’t recognize the existence of “Israeli” as a nationality.
[ . . . ]
Among the petitioners are those categorized on the identity cards as “Jew,” “Druze,” “Georgian,” “Russian,” and even one “Hebrew.” Not one of them is “Israeli,” and the reason is simple – the Israeli state does not recognize any Israeli nationality that isn’t Jewish. Even the Supreme Court ruled in 1970 that there was no such thing as Israeli nationality.
Must be part of that Israeli plot for world domination… convince ’em that they don’t exist.
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Doug Camilli reports that Katie Holmes and Chris Klein are engaged:
This surprised nobody, because they’ve been a couple for five years, an eternity in young Hollywood. They are said to be looking for a movie project they can do together.
Please god, not a project together! Katie and Chris, I have one word for you: Bennifer.
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Us Montrealers are a hardy lot, we like to argue. We laugh at snow. We shrug off sleet. We survived the Ice Storm of 98, for cripes’ sake! We’re not like those wimpy Torontonians, who call in the army when the snow falls.
But I think somebody needs to tell that to the average Montreal driver.
Yesterday it was snowing. It’s January. This is not an atypical or unusual event. Okay, so it was icy underneath the snow. But that happens frequently as well. Temperature drops are not exactly news to us here.
So why is it that a little bit of snow caused rush-hour panic on the roads? Could somebody please explain to me why it took almost triple the amount of time as usual for me to drive home, all because of a little snowfall?
The salt trucks and snowplows exist. I know they do, because our tax dollars fund them. So where were they yesterday? Certainly not near any roads that I was on. And most Montrealers have snow tires… and if they don’t, they should and they are idiots with no excuse. After all, where do they think they’re living anyway? It’s not exactly news that Montreal gets snow in the winter. It’s happened every year for a very long time. Why does it come as such a shock to people? And why does snow seem to give every moron out there a license to drive like a total idiot? News flash: an inch of snow on the ground does NOT entitle you to run red lights, block intersections, or clip somebody’s bumper and drive along because it’s too cold outside to stop and exchange insurance information. (If the asshole who did that last one to me yesterday is reading this, you’re lucky that your license plate was too dirty and salt-stained for me to read).
If Montrealers want to keep our bragging rights that life goes on as usual here when it snows, then we have to grow up and learn how to deal with winter. After all, we can no longer make fun of Toronto for their hockey team… we need to hold onto something!
So get proper tires, a shovel, a snow brush, winter wipers, and top off on the windshield washer fluid before you head out on the roads this winter. Snow is no excuse for sheer idiocy.
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