I don’t know how to tell this story.  It was so bizarre, and so creepy, and in hindsight so hilarious, that I just know I won’t be able to do it justice in print.  Okay.  Anyway.

This is a story about the cab ride I had between Halifax and the Halifax International Airport, which is about a half hour drive.  I booked a cab the night before and it showed up right on time - which was the end of the good part of this story.  It’s pretty much all downhill from here.

You know how you chat with the cab driver?  I don’t either but in Halifax, you do.  I think it’s an east coast thing, this friendliness, and since I am trying to overcome my social phobia I went with it.  The cabbie’s opener was about the weather: a hurricane was supposed to hit the city that day but it never materialized, which we agreed was a good thing.  And then he asked me if I remembered the big snow storm that hit Halifax five years back - they called it White Juan.

I certainly did remember White Juan - it happened while Husband and I were engaged in cross country courtship, and I have digital photos he sent me of his glass apartment patio door totally blocked out with snow.  There was so much snow that you could walk down the sidewalks and your feel were at the same level as the tops of the parking meters.  So I said something like, “Yeah, I heard that was pretty terrible.”  And the cabbie says, “The snow was so deep you couldn’t see the hookers!”

Which is sort of weird, right?  Would you bring up hookers as your measuring stick for the severity of a storm with a customer who is a young woman and a total stranger to you?  But okay, not a big deal, the guy’s a little crude, but then again so am I.  I got so comfortable with the friend who put me up while in Halifax that at one point this week I actually found myself absent mindedly stratching my behind under my pajama pants while we chatted in the kitchen - it is a testimony to our friendship that he pretended not to notice me sticking my arm down the back of my pants to stratch my ass right in front of him.

So the next conversational move was the standard question about where I was flying to.  Vancouver, I say, and the cabbie gets really excited and says, “That’s where all those hookers were!”

Which struck me as pretty creepy.  Yes, we have a lot of prostitutes here.  There’s a lot of poverty and a lot of drugs and it all kind of goes together.  But you shouldn’t get so pleased by it, ya know?  But then I thought, oh, I know why he’s thinking of the hookers in Vancouver - it’s the Pickton case.  For those who don’t know, there was recently a trial in Vancouver of a man called Robert Pickton who, over a series of many years, abducted and murdered something like twenty prostitutes from the downtown east side of Vancouver.  He dismembered them and buried them on his pig farm.  It was a major scandal because, in addition to there being a serial killer in our area, these women had been disappearing for years and no one investigated it, because they were sex workers and apparently beneath notice.

Anyway, so I say something about that - “You must mean the Pickton case,” and then it starts to get seriously weird as the cabbie goes into a monologue which I will attempt to paraphrase here.  It is important that, as you read this, you keep in mind that the cabbie had absolutely no distress in his voice or on his face, and was actually nearly smiling the entire time: “Those poor hookers!  I found a website about them, the hookers, and it has all their pictures and their biographies, and I just read it and read it and I sobbed and sobbed because it is so sad that all those hookers got killed, what a shame.  Just because they’re hookers doesn’t mean they should be kidnapped and murdered.  I mean, there’s nothing wrong with hookers.  Hookers are just women.  And I can’t tell you how much I cried about those hookers on that website.  I keep going back there to look at those hookers because you should remember dead hookers, what a shame that was.”

I can’t replicate his words exactly but he probably said “hookers” over twenty times.  And as I say, despite the talk of how tragic and horrible it all was, he sounded a little excited and happy to me.  And this, my friends, is very fucking creepy.  I tried to change the subject but he cut me off to tell me about the time he drove to Vancouver for a visit.  He was at great pains to tell me about how shocking and “sad” it was to find himself in the DTES, “where all the hookers are.”  (He ended up there by accident, he reported.)  So once he found a hotel outside the DTES, he figured he was sufficiently recharged from a day of driving and took a walk back downtown to watch “the hookers.”

At about this time I started watching the highway signs with some nervousness, planning what I’d do if he took the wrong exit or otherwise revealed himself as the sort of person who, in addition to obsessing about murdered prostitutes, likes to murder fares.

Somehow or other the conversation did get moved along, and we ended up talking about his grow operations in Nova Scotia (he’s done indoor and outdoor), and also his drug convictions related to growing and selling marijuana.  Apparently he’s managed to avoid most of his jail time due to having a good lawyer, and the prosecuting RCMP officer being corrupt and having a lot of his cases overturned.  He told me these things in such a way that they were supposed to be stories about the incompetence of cops and the hilariousness of an officer getting busted stealing dope from the evidence locker, but all I was hearing was “jail time” and “drug convictions.”

Half an hour of hooker murders and criminal botany.  I have probably never been so creeped out by anyone in my life.  I mean, what do you do in this situation?  Challenge the obviously unhinged creepy dude who’s driving the car you’re stuck in?  Tell him what you really think?  Or try to stay neutral, which seemed to have the effect of encouraging him to talk about it more? I’m telling you, this guy made the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up.  There is something wrong with him.

Gah.

I got home from Halifax today.  I have now been up for… twenty hours.  All I can really say, other than that I am totally exhausted and still sick with a very resilient cold, is Husband makes better posts than I do, Halifax was warmer than expected and I sweated a lot, and I have an amusing story about a cab driver and some hookers to tell you.

But first I have to go drool on my pillow for many hours.

This just in, presidential candidate John McCain has come back from the future and run Internet ads in which he reveals that he has already won tonight’s first presidential debate, the debate he cancelled just two days ago.

I for one say, Welcome Republican Overlords of the Future.

Here’s the link to the original screenshot from the Washington Post.

An American investor, Melvin J. Howard, is suing the Canadian government, using NAFTA to allow him to establish a private surgical clinic in B.C.

Under little known Chapter 11 of NAFTA, government is not permitted to interfere in such a way as to give a corporate entity from one nation advantage over its neighbour.

Up until now, big American health corporations have not been permitted in Canada because of our single-payer system.  Enter the False Creek Surgical Centre, which just happens to offer private health services, completely outside of the BC Medical Services Plan.

The surgical centre has operated in plain knowledge of the provincial and federal governments for years, and Howard’s argument is essentially that he is running into government roadblocks which Canadian private clinics do not have to face.  He might have a very strong Chapter 11 argument, which will force the government’s hand into opening up the playing field to huge US corporate interests, the same machine which has left nearly 50 million Americans uninsured, that many again underinsured; and health bills are the most cited reason for personal bankruptcy in the US.

Is this what we want of our health care system?

The part that’s most aggravating is that this was a totally forseeable outcome.  Canada has been in NAFTA for a long time, and the Prime Minister of Canada and Premier of BC are both smart enough to know the consequences of letting the surgical centre grow unchecked.  It was no better than a red rag to a bull.

Kinda makes you think maybe they were turning a wilfully blind eye the whole time.  Kinda makes you wonder what else is in NAFTA that we might get hammered with down the road.

Let ‘em know what you think:

Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper (Hmm, isn’t this guy up for re-election?)

Premier of British Columbia, Gordon Campbell

(A big shout out to all my homies over at Canadian Doctors for Medicare and their blog for tipping me off.)

I awoke to the stench of rotten.

In the hurly-burly of getting li’l blogo off to the airport early on Monday, then working a late shift Monday night (thus going straight to bed upon getting home), some innocently forgotten food items were left on the kitchen counter Sunday night.  They were left there with good intentions of a kitchen clean-up, good intentions that got lost paving the road to Hell.  This-morning (Tuesday), the food returned from Hell, sadder, and certainly not wiser.  More like, vengeful.

I should add that they had previously overstayed their welcome in the fridge by about a week. . .

Offender #1 was a quinoa and cashew sauce dish with cubed tofu.  Healthy healthy healthy!  Offender #2 was a garden variety salad.

The smell was astonishingly remniscient of an experience from summer camp at age 15.  At the end of the summer, I was helping clean up a kitchen.  Of course, this included taking out all the old garbage bags.  One of them unfortunately contained 30 pounds of forgotten, raw, t-bone steaks, dripping in their bloody juices, awash in maggots.  But that’s not what I noticed first.  I had innocently been attempting to tie off the top of the bag when a very unfortunate out-gassing occurred.  The stench-wave induced immediate nausea, and I had to run outside to avoid immediately vomiting.

The best part happened next.

Did I mention that this was a summer cadet camp?  For those who don’t know, the cadets are a paramilitary organization for teenagers, and yes, it’s very much a natural experiment in Lord of The Flies, except with shiny boots and starched collars.  So, I was naturally Ordered by my 17 year old Platoon Sergeant, drunk on his petty power, to go back in there and Get That Garbage!  I did, but not before getting rotten blood on my arms, starchy shirt, and shiny boots.

Summer camp is wholesome, and it gives memories for a lifetime, memories which roused me from my slumbers this morning.  In our time of living, we are vibrant, colourful, and varied.  In our decay, we are one.  Blogo has been gone for 23.5 hours, and I have already reverted to complete savagery.  At least there’s no rotten blood.  And no petty teen dictators.

So while I’m in Halifax this week, Husband says he will be writing a guest post or two here.  I have no idea what he’ll opine about, but he’s interested in all kinds of interesting things and you never know what he might hold forth about!

Make sure you make him feel at home!

Can someone explain cellphone texting to me?  I don’t get it.  It takes much longer to send a text (between typing and scrolling through menus to select actions and recipients and whatnot) than to just phone someone. And, if you’re expecting a response, it’s totally faster to just speak than to text and wait for a texted response.

Yet loads of people text.

So: why?  Is it a mechanism of social avoidance?  Is it fun?  If it’s not efficiency, then what the heck is it?

Husband is spending the morning watching American news clips discussing Sarah Palin, which all involve the talking heads getting really heated and shouting at each other.  He finds this hilarious; it really stresses me out.  There’s nothing worse than het-up newsanchors trying to shout each other down over something that, let’s face it, should be so painfully obvious that no discussion is required.

Here is a summary: Palin is underqualified and scary right wing.  The haggling over what her role and abilities are reminds me of all the talking that went on in the wake of 9/11.  Long after the rest of the world had accepted that the US used it as an excuse to wage a war for money, the American news media was still going on and on about weapons of mass destruction and terrorism and the intelligence provided by the CIA, as though there was really any debate - which basically just made them look like asses.  They weren’t fooling anyone but themselves.  Same with Palin.

But I recently read an interesting article that is very relevant here, about why people vote Republican, and why folks like Palin have special appeal.  It’s about moral sense and how people intuitively understand and apply morality.  Of the five dimensions of morality identified by the author throughout his research career, Democrats utilize two: harm/care, and fairness/reciprocity.  Republicans use these two, but also the other three: ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. In short, Republicans hit all our moral receptors - Democrats only hit two, and rely on the application of reason to justify staying away from the other three.  Alas, we are a species driven by its hardware, and reason is often not good enough.

Here are some traditionally Democrat/left values that violate our moral sense: tolerance of all races and genders and sexual orientations violates ingroup/loyalty.  Challenging authority, protesting the government, holding sit-ins and other acts of civil disobedience violates authory/respect.  Keeping religion out of government, “traditional” family values being moved aside in favour of gay adoption, divorce and abortion rights violate purity/sanctity.

If I understand this article correctly, we are all instinctual Republicans.  This is an evolutionary legacy.  It requires quite a lot of difficult work to overcome - compounded because, as Pascal Boyer writes, it further goes against our evoluionary programming to even think scientifically.  Two unnatural acts are required before one can arrive at Democratic principles - none for Republican.

Holy shitbags I am sick.  I am dying from sick.  I cannot tell you how sick I am.  I am so sick I had us pack up our entrees and leave the restaurant we were having dinner at before actually eating anything, because I just needed to get home and collapse on the couch.

Now I have roughly 36 hours to get well before boarding a plane.  Groan!

Aunt Jemima butter flavoured syrup is better than real maple syrup.

Kraft Dinner is better than any home made variant.

Pepperoni is better then steak.