Casselmanual

Fuck Third-world Children says Stephen Harper at second pro-Asbestos Rally

2011-04-28T13:10:00.006-04:00

Reprinted from the net:

SmartVote: Stop playing politics with asbestos, union and health groups tell Harper

For immediate release: April 26, 2011

Groups make toxic mineral an election issue
Health Organizations, Unions push Harper on Asbestos Ban

“Put people’s lives ahead of politics, Mr Harper,” groups urge.

In an open letter sent today, over twenty health, union and environmental organisations call on Prime Minister Harper to end his support for the asbestos trade.

Harper is today holding his second rally in Asbestos, Quebec (population around 7,000 in a country of 33 million), seeking votes by promoting himself as the political leader most dedicated to the asbestos industry.

“We call on you to put people’s lives ahead of politics,” said Dr Kapil Khatter of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment. “Canada’s leading medical authorities have all told you that the export of asbestos is medically and morally indefensible and will lead to an epidemic of asbestos-related disease and death overseas.”

Canada was the world’s biggest asbestos exporter in the last century, but the asbestos industry is now bankrupt and about to die out. The last operating asbestos mine in Canada is in Thetford Mines, Quebec. It is under bankruptcy protection and is laying off some of its 350 workers because its asbestos deposit will soon be exhausted.

“Public policy should be based on science, not on politics,” said Christian Simard, executive director, Nature Québec. “The science is indisputable that all forms of asbestos are deadly. Not a single reputable authority supports P.M. Harper’s policy that asbestos can be safely used.“

“Canada is becoming known as an immoral asbestos pusher and as an enemy of global public health,” said Kathleen Ruff, senior human rights adviser to the Rideau Institute. “This is not the role Canadians want to play in the world.”

Harper has promised to block an upcoming meeting of the U.N. Environmental Convention (Rotterdam Convention) so as to prevent chrysotile asbestos being listed as a hazardous substance. Chrysotile asbestos represents 100% of the global asbestos trade.

“P.M. Harper is the only national leader in Canada and in the Western world to promote asbestos,” said Dr Khatter. “This election is about trust and integrity. We are urgently pleading with P.M. Harper: Show integrity by respecting the science and put human life ahead of partisan political interests. We hope he will listen.”

WANT TO SEE THE FACTS HARPER IGNORES?

READ my website. Click above. Then click link at top of first page of my website.

Vote anyone but Harper.

Rid Canada of this immoral fascist bastard!

GARY LUNN, the bobblehead that walks like a man

2011-04-02T10:36:00.010-04:00

Uncle Billy's Unbiased Election Diary

Entry #2

Harper Cabinet Dwarf

Revealed as ‘Over His Head’ Bully

Gary Lunn, the bobblehead that almost walks like a man, has finally been called in print what Ottawa insiders have known since the day of Lunn’s arrival in our capital city. Stephen Harper’s very own Vancouver Island little person, Gary Lunn is a bully. By the way, it is said Gary Lunn entered Ottawa drawn in a thimble pulled by a team of tiny pine-borers. No doubt just another Liberal fairy tale!

Bully for you, Lunn!

The Honourable Gary Lunn, following his Chalk River nuclear disaster, was personally demoted from federal Minister of Natural Resources to Minister of State for Sport (Garykins, just you be cautious that there are no widdle splinters in those hockey-wockey sticks or kiddie foreheads pocked with puck dents, you big silly! Uh, sorry, you little silly). But like a good, Harper-loyal Conservative thug, Prince Lunnlet the Little has stayed a bully. Harper loves bullies, from galumphing clod and bully the Honourable John Baird, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons, to malignant dwarf, Jim Flaherty, the traitor who, as Canada’s Minister of Finance, actually told European businessmen to NOT patronize Ontario (his own province!).

This branding of Lunn is tragic because Gary Lunn probably gave up a promising career in the circus as a picayune clown to be in politics and thus join the array of the Immortals. Trouble is, there are so few seats for homunculi on Olympus.

The Grim Tale

Linda Keen was CEO of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. In 2007, she ordered a four-week shutdown of a 50-year-old nuclear reactor in Chalk River, Ont. Keen blew the whistle on Canada’s incompetent nuclear performance, something the diminutive Lunn should have been keeping his good eye on. But Gary Lunn was too busy buying expensive suits to make him look taller. Ever notice how many shrimpy guys like to overdress? But hey, Canada, as we’ve learned in Japan recently, nuclear energy is completely safe. Right! Just read back over the last 20 years of feculent press releases of the Atomic Energy Commission of Canada to hear again all the old safety bullshit. Or listen to the blatant crap issued by the PMO in the wake of the nuclear unsafety at Chalk River, the veritable diarrhea of nuclear fibs that issued from Harper flunkies. I mean it: reread what Harper's henchmen said and understand it in the light of the Japanese disaster. And, Canada, you are getting ready to let this monster of unconcern run our country for another four years!

The Charge

As reporter Cindy Harnett put it succinctly in the Times Colonist newspaper on April 2, 2011, “Keen said a routine inspection of the reactor by regulatory staff found that mandatory safety upgrades to prevent the remote risk of a core meltdown during an earthquake had not been carried out in violation of its operating licence.”

Important to remember that, Canada. Even when the Tory next to you yawns, “Oh, not that important." No, especially in light of what just happened Japanside. Do you remember how that weevil Lunn tried to pooh-pooh the danger, as did The Right Honourable Stephen Harper? Did either of those cynical zeroes care about the safety of the Canadian people? Not for one nano-second, especially if such care might endanger support for the Conservative Party. Right. If your kids glow in the dark, it’ll save money on electricity and help preserve our pure, unpolluted-by-tar-sands country. Why, the pristine pasturelands of our rolling dominion shall never again be fouled by the brittle corpses of bituminous ducklets.

It’s pretty clear those bastards Lunn and Harper would rather see children poisoned than fix badly operated nuclear facilities. That is not acceptable.

The fired Keen revealed that the miniscule Lunn had wanted her to cover up the shabby state of Chalk River and promote use of funds to build new reactors; never mind regulating old leaky reactors. In response to this charge, the runty, imperfect Lunn has pulled the usual Harper cabinet ploy: deny everything. You know where Harper’s handlers picked up that advice, don’t you? That’s what criminal lawyers tell their client murderers to do: deny, deny, deny.

Gary Lunn is compact scum and a liar. He should not be re-elected. He should be running a souvenir stand at Tofino that sells plaster whales. Dwarf whales. Ones that glow in the dark.

- - - more to upchuck, as the election trail unwinds

COPS NAB HUDAK-APPROVED ONTARIO TORY CANDIDATE

2011-03-31T12:28:00.007-04:00

Uncle Billy’s Unbiased Election Notes 2011

Ontario Tory Candidate

Arrested on Fraud Charges

Here’s the kind of person that Ontario Tory Munchkin-Leader Tiny Tim Hudak wants to run Ontario. Check him out.

Salman Farooq, 35, a Progressive Conservative candidate for the Ontario fall election has been charged with fraud. He was arrested March 30 in Woodbridge. Farooq had been the Tory candidate in the Pickering-Scarborough East riding. Tim Hudak’s choice, Farooq is accused on 14 charges of mortgage and credit card fraud. Before gracefully giving up his noble candidacy this week, Farooq hosted fund-raising parties attended by Tory Leader Tim Hudak.

Just what has Mr. Farooq been accused of doing wrong? Is this a mere tempest in a teapot? Well, here's what the Globe and Mail newspaper printed on April 1, 2011: "Mr. Farooq is charged with two counts of fraud over $5,000, two counts of uttering a forged document, attempted fraud over $5,000, possession of property obtained by crime, possession of a credit card obtained by crime, use of a credit card obtained by crime, fraudulent possession of credit card data, fraudulent use of credit card data, conspiracy to commit an indictable offence, personation with intent, obtaining credit by fraud, and possession of property obtained by crime over $5,000."

Not too shabby for one camel ride around a Toronto block!

What has brave Tim Hudak to say about this scandal? Nothing. Timmy is hiding behind mommy's apron. Timmy has no comment. That's odd. Timmy always has comments whenever a Liberal or Dipper does wrong. Guess Tim Hudak is showing his true colours, those of a gutless, cringing, lickspittle, cowardly political opportunist. Is this a foretaste of how Tim Hudak is going to handle a crisis when he's premier of Ontario? Run and hide? What an unsuitable, clownish anus Hudak is! Is it true that Hudak has NEVER held a regular job in his life? Is it true Hudak has spent his entire career lips stuck out and firmly attached to the public tit? Do find out before you vote for him.

All this amateur sleaze and bungled checking reminds one of the high-class candidates once dug up from under Ontario rocks by former premier Mike “Shoot That Injun!” Harris. Mr. Farooq is an excellent example of the thoughtful care and research that goes into Tim Hudak’s personal vetting of Tory candidates in Ontario, so that persons of startling unsuitability can be stopped in their tracks.

Can Ontarians kindly remember the damage inflicted on Ontario's people and schools by Mike Harris.

Don't put this unshaved pseudo-Mike-Harris imitation in charge of Ontario. We let Harris trample and disfigure our beautiful province for 8 years. Look where Ontario is now: broke, disgraced, impoverished, after the Tory pillaging and utter absence of leadership. Ontario once led Canada; now we're a have-not province. Thanks to Mike Harris and the Conservative Party of Ontario.

- more to follow as Hudak steps deeper into intra-electional fecal matter

Harper Sucks Obama Dick Big Time

2011-02-07T11:24:00.002-05:00

Big Oil Puppet Stevie Harper
&
The Fetid Joys of the Grievance-Monger

Grievance-monger is a phrase worth recalling from the unremembered shores of the Lethean word river. It fits today’s professional protesters and injustice-collectors, the self-pitying whiners who parade at public events here in the Western world, their young, angry, unlived-in faces smug with the disdain common to all of history’s junior anarchists, the grievance-mongering losers who never vote, the protesters who have never tried to do anything but wail and bitch, put-upon-pie children whose sole innocent purpose is to destroy a world.

As their rocks through windows and burning police cars shatter public order, so their moans pollute our civil air, as they did in Toronto last fall. The fecal joy in their animal faces as they ignite buildings and burn down peaceful assemblies tells onlookers all we need to know about these ring-nosed, buttock-tattooed scum.

Seeing their own reflections in the glass shards of the windows they have just smashed reveals the origin of their brainless anger. As supreme American essayist Gore Vidal once wrote, “It is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in the mirror.”

Of course, legitimate grievance exists, like the protest this month in Egypt, where an army-supported, American-financed tinpot fascist dictator, having been momentarily pushed offstage, lurks in the wings slavering like some leprous Phantom of the Pyramids, ready to goose-step wobblingly back to power, at the head of an army bristling with American bayonets and Yankee tankees. What does Uncle Sam care if ten million Egyptians starve? As long as that oil flows and fifty wealthy Egyptian families wallow in their sticky pelf, poised to gob and swill at the pig trough of oil glut forever.

How does Stevie Harper, our Canadian prime minister, respond? Harper travels to Washington with his own personal set of kneepads, kneels down and sucks Obama’s dick, in the most servile act of national abasement this writer can remember. Obama smirks, turns his ass to Harper and cooes, “If you behave, Stevie, I'll let you vacuum-suction a few turds right out of my anus. Hell, dude, it’ll save me takin' a dump. What else are Canadians good for?”

And this Stevie Harper is the Big Oil puppet whom Canadians are getting ready to re-elect as Prime Minister.

Will the stunned Canuck sheep ever wake up?

A herd-wide reveille does not appear imminent.

CASSELMAN IN PERSON !

2010-10-13T17:21:00.002-04:00

NEW XMAS BOOK FOR WORD NUTS

2010-09-27T14:42:00.004-04:00

Click on the image above and the one below to enlarge it.

Click here to read a sample & preview of this,
my funniest and best-written word book

Visit my web site on words today

Seeing “Evita” at Ontario’s Stratford Shakespeare Festival? Bring a vomit bag.

2010-07-23T15:20:00.007-04:00

Do Cry for Me, an Evita-Audience-Member.

July 23, 2010

I just saw “Evita” at Ontario’s Stratford Shakespeare Festival.

A drum machine and a drunk with a tin whistle could have composed that clattery, incompetent music. Utter tat!

By Euterpe (Greek goddess of music) what a loud, grating, truly lousy show.

Enough to make Richard Rogers circumvolve in his sepulcher!

“Evita” comprises the usual Andrew Lloyd Webber musical stillbirth: one good song delivered, namely “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina,” followed by two long hours of strident, unmelodious afterbirth, with the remainder of the Evitan cacophony made up of a bad pastiche of Latin American rhumbas and tangos. All I can do is to quote the Latin New Testament: Noli me Tangere! A rattling-speaker sound system and desperately over-miked actors did not help.

Each summer, in its customary accommodating manner, Stratford’s Avon Theater finds a new way to make audiences uncomfortable. For years the Avon delighted in narrow seats designed in the 1940s for 46-pound tubercular anorexics. This summer the project is entitled: “We Can Effectively Deafen 30,000 Theatergoers.” The second-hand Altec speakers employed inside the Avon were last used for an open air concert a few years ago in Greece. It was a lute recital by Orpheus.

Remember the talentless pandemonium of Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard”? One good song “With One Look” and two hours of “fill” music. Same thing with “Evita.” Theatrical spectacle, touted as Europe’s “contribution” to the modern Broadway musical, crams the Avon stage with all manner of metallic moving scenery. At the Avon, for this “Evita,” a Brutalist iron gridwork of Latin American balconies, up stage, dominates the entire production. Here’s a musical that opens with a large casket pushed into audience faces! Giant sliding screens of steel mesh enclose the setting. Ominously the satanic mesh gates open and close throughout the musical to frame the repression of Peron’s dictatorship and symbolize the narrowness of Evita’s mind and possibly of her twat. Ewwww, what a deep thought!

As intelligent critics have pointed out over the long, long years of Webber’s failure-stained career, the hyped-up theatrical machinery that overpowers his musicals is there for one purpose: to cover up the absence of listenable music in his musicals. Andrew Lloyd Webber does not write well in any sustained manner through one individual musical. Thus, say all the directors who sit in rehearsal listening to his fumblings and tawdry musical parodies of better composers, we better snow the audience rubes with moving scrims and stage trickery. Remember "Phantom of the Opera" when, sitting in a front row, you thought you might spend the hours immediately after the performance having fragments of a chandelier surgically removed from your date's breasts?

In the 2010 program handed out at this year’s Avon production in Stratford, there is some self-serving propaganda by one of the “musicology experts” who occasionally bore us to death on CBC Radio, namely one Robert Harris. Robert proceeds to tell us that the lack of song and character in Lloyd Webber’s work is purposive. Riiight!

I can only permit myself to quote Harris’ silliest sentence: “The modern musical (like the modern sensibility, one is tempted to say) is one of powerful showiness, presented to the hardened gaze of cold reflection – which is absorbed by the spectacular but simultaneously suspicious of it.” Horseshit, Harris! Utter poppycock. The vilest pro-Stratford spin on bad art. There is not one line smart enough to be “suspicious” of spectacle in “Evita.” It is a deeply stupid libretto with stupid lyrics and under them pokey, hiccupy, chattery music that is, chiefly, a farrago of ill-written recitativo. As for his music flowing melodically in any fashion, Webber has never even heard of legato. However, little Andrew did attend class the day they demonstrated staccato.

Let me return to recitativo briefly. Such a recitative is a manner of musical declaiming in between singing and spoken words, used in the dialogue and narrative parts of an opera or oratorio. So it’s another ploy Webber filches from grand opera. Let us imagine a singer in an opera whose stage character has the most mundane of information to convey to the audience. Instead of speaking a line such as, “I’ll go upstairs to see if father is feeling better,” the character sort of sing-speaks a line like “I shall ascend the bruised marble of the solemn steps whereunto and whither lies the chamber of my paternal entity.” In others words, the libretto writer’s gaspingly bad stage dialogue is obscured, scummed over, by glutinous, stringy musical lines of no discernable melody.

Now, recitativo can work in the hands of a lyricist capable of clever stage words and a composer adept at long lines of fetching underscoring. Think of Lerner’s speak-a-song items for Rex Harrison in “My Fair Lady” or for Richard Burton in “Camelot.” With talent, anything is possible.

If you don’t believe my judgments about this junk , obtain an original cast recording of “Evita” and just audit the hours of clunkish crap that Rice and Webber pitchfork at us, as if we were unfed cattle who had never heard “Showboat,” “The Merry Widow” or anything by Puccini.

By the way, the reason I called Robert Harris’ shameless defense of “Evita” self-serving is because Robert Harris works for the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. Harris, twinkling pixieishly, appears at Stratford’s little afternoon tea parties for wheelchaired grannies dispensing his boiled-sweet bons mots in a breathless macaroon-and-molasses voice that has become anathema to any CBC Radio listener with even a modicum of musicological knowledge. Here in this program praising “Evita,” Robert Harris is a low hack, shilling for his supper.

In writing “Evita,” Webber and Rice decided they would revolutionize the bedraggled Broadway musical comedy. The two Brit geniuses would insert solid characterization and nasty protagonists into the flimsy, sentimental, light-headed American musical tradition. This dipstick duo would bring back to the musical what it left behind in the 1870s – galumphing, clumping, lead-footed stage spectacle and ten-ton sets that would have made P. T. Barnum proud when he introduced Jumbo the Elephant and Elasto, The Rubber Boy of Borneo.

Wow, we’d see a poor Argentinian woman, Eva Duarte, generally perceived to be an ambitious slut, presented on stage in all her pushiness and watch her vamp a fudge-brained Fascist moron, an army officer who through sheer luck became president of Argentina. Eva Duarte could act and she put on a lifelong performance as a “friend of the people of the Argentine.”

So there is material in her life’s tale with which to confect a powerful musical story. But this Webber-Rice offering is not it. Placed beside any of the great composers of the last 100 years on Broadway or in The West End, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s work reflects what used to be called “the pathetic fallacy,” his physical status as a homunculus apes perfectly the dwarfed nature of his musical accomplishment. He’s a low-talent imitator of other, greater composers. The one or two songs that are pleasant from each of his musicals are unoriginal, treacle-soaked kitsch with their melodic content owing a heavy debt to bad 19^th-century opera dreck, like Meyerbeer and other kings of copycat shlock. Yes, he got lucky a few times. “Cats” comes to mind. But consider the lugubrious sludge of failed song in his ten to twenty junk musicals: “Love Never Dies “(2010) [Casselman insert: Oh yes it does J], “By Jeeves” (1996), “Bombay Dreams” (2002), “The Woman in White” (2004), “The Beautiful Game” (2000), “Aspects of Love” (1989). Vast cabinets full of his sheet music will supply shit-sheets for the bottoms of bird cages for decades to come, no, for centuries. Name one solid singable song from any of those turkeys.

Timothy Miles Bindon Rice, the Webber-footed lyricist here, has never written a single line of fresh, lively, inventive English lyrics in all his long life. Tim Rice has NO idea of how to be witty or to advance character by means of the playful poetic use of English, as did Lerner, Hammerstein, Porter, Berlin, as does the brilliant Sondheim. As the “Evita” lyricist, Rice is a peon. The lyrics to “Evita” are pedestrian and astoundingly banal. No word play, no delight in language, just stoned typing. For Robert Harris to claim that their work represents anything in the modern musical except the abyss is simply laughable.

I promised I would try to spare any more Robert Harris lines, but I must include one more to demonstrate what a moral vacuum encloses this man’s stated-in-print politics. Writes Harris, “It’s hard for those of us bombarded by the fractured kaleidoscopes of our over-changing present to know exactly what to make of Juan Peron and his second wife, Eva . . .” What!? Just how high in the isolating ivory tower of CBC Radio executivedom did you dwell, Mr. Harris? Peron was a Fascist brain-stem and Eva was his whore. There is NO dispute about that among persons acquainted with Latin American history.

The Stratford cast puts forth a yeoman effort. Chilina Kennedy as Evita tries her best to overcome bad noisy songwriting and a musical play that does not give a fig about fine-tuning human character and presenting its foibles in an entertaining mode.

Others may clasp Andrew Lloyd Webber to their song-moistened bosoms. They weep, you see, upon hearing his songs and the tears bedew their embonpoints. But I have not changed my mind about the Weblet’s minimal talent.

Save your 110 dollars this summer. Don’t go to "Evita."

Buy a good history of Argentina and read about what this evil, detestable couple inflicted on their country. It is nothing to sing about.

— Bill Casselman, audience victim of “Evita”

Go, Ignatieff, & Stand Not upon the Order of Your Going

2010-06-15T11:59:00.004-04:00

Ignatieff Must Go

Summer Musings of a Political Amatuer

I withdraw my support for Michael Ignatieff as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada completely, unreservedly.

Nihil obstat opprobrium meum ( Latin: ‘Nothing stands in the way of my utter disapproval.’

I have had to delete a blog I wrote in September of 2008 stating that I would vote for Michael Ignatieff as Prime Minister by voting Liberal in the next election.

Totally do I reject his fitness to lead the Liberal Party.

Professor Ignatieff has zero charisma. No voter appeal.

I’ve seen things lying on their thoraxes at the bottom of stagnant ponds that had more allure.

Canadians don’t like him. He’s a cold academic snotfuck. He belongs at the University of Toronto sneering at all Canadians not on campus.

He is obviously unelectable.

What perverse, politically unwise party loyalty leads Liberals to give every stumblebum candidate a chance to lose a federal election? It is Liberal, gooey-hearted Ignatieffophiles who will doom us to another four years of Harper’s doctrinaire fascism.

Look, Liberal voters, the first function, the prime duty, the sole positional raison d’être of a party leader is to win an election. Nothing else counts until that goal is accomplished.

Why do Liberals think the party has to give every elected leader a chance to win or lose an election? That lackadaisical laissez-faire, that kindheartedness dipped in sentimental treacle, is one of the reasons the Liberal party is today without policy and without direction.

No Liberal Party member OWES Ignatieff a chance to run, not when every spicule of evidence points to his disastrous loss. Why will the Party not bestir itself and wake up before the fetid billows of the doom-flood overwhelm the deck of state?

After it has been clearly demonstrated (polls, public opinion, barbershop gossip) that he or she can’t possibly win an election, a leader must be dumped and replaced.

The precious future of our country is not a dinky toy to play with in the kindergarten of childish do-goodism. “Awww, give him one go at the brass ring.” Why? So he can get his dick caught in it as the merry-go-around whirls by, on its only revolution.

Voters don’t like Ignatieff; he has not got a political bone in his body; he is too old (Do you want a 64-year-old snotty professor running Canada?); He hasn’t thought about what Canada needs and, if he has, he and the hack scribblers who write his dreary speeches have not enunciated it with precision or clarity, so that Liberal policy appeals to Canadians, so that Liberal plans stand out in distinction and in opposition to the bumbling ego-trips of one-billion-for-cops Harper.

You must have watched on television Ignatieff and his handlers’ pathetic attempts at “meeting the people” during wince-making “townhall meetings.” As Ignatieff’s clammy hand deigns to almost shake the hand of some unclean goofy peasant, you can just see Michael thinking ‘Damn, I hope they have the antibacterial hand spray waiting for me in the limo. That bumpkin dared to besmirch my princely digits.’

What Ignatieff is best at is — disdain. Contempt oozes from his every pore, unless some fellow ivory-towerling is spewing 19^th century economic theorems while songbirds fall dead from nearby maple trees, anaesthetized by tedium.

Watch Ignatieff at a press conference when one of the ninnies sent by the newspapers asks a more than usually stupid question. Ignatieff flashes his editing smile. His handlers have told him and told him to never lecture the dummies. So Ignatieff edits his loathing of ordinary persons’ lack of education and dons a foxy smirk that is so phony, so caked with professorial odium that its uncharitable, inhuman nastiness makes you turn your face away.

Please, Liberal Party, don’t saddle us with another swayback nag, a born loser of elections. Wasn’t the non-motile Dion enough?

Surely you can find a charismatic woman or man in their forties fit to learn to rule a mari oleoso usque ad mare oleosum ‘’ from sea to oily sea.’

- - - Bill Casselman, June 15, 2010

Greedy Pharmacists Lie Like Troopers

2010-04-16T14:46:00.010-04:00

a pharmacy in olden days

Ontario Drugstore Kickbacks May End Soon

Here’s a comment on my first column about big pharmacies cheating and gouging and stealing from Ontario pill customers: (To read it click pharmacies in the list on the left side of this page)

MountainPharmD has left a new comment on your post "Ontario Pharmacies: Pigs swilling at the glut trough":

“Wow...you are an idiot. That idiotic rant goes to show you have zero understanding of anything related to pharmacy. Your confused ramblings make absolutely no sense. You bash Pharmacists in the same breath as big pharm and giant corporate retail pharmacy as if they are one in the same. Pull your head out of your ass you will find the view is much clearer.”

Note to Mountain PharmD: The expression in English is: they are one and the same. Idiot! Sorry. Illiterate Idiot!

Bill Casselman Replies

Dear MountainPharmD:

This idiot has written 12 books on etymology and has been called by Oxford University Press: “Bill Casselman is one of the country’s leading etymologists.” Anyone who thinks I’m an idiot can take a look at my 400-page website on the history of English words and can decide for themselves whether or not an idiot could have written those pages.

Now, as to the accusation, let me first say this: I would rather be a ranting idiot than a god-damn liar like most pharmacists who claim that the Ontario government is going to remove all the wonderful “services” than Ontario pharmacists perform for their beloved customers, when the government tries to reduce the outrageous cost of pills in drugstores through the elimination of glutinous kickbacks to drugstores, bribed so they will sell cheaper generic drugs.

Keep that always in mind as you listen over the next months to pharmacists whimpering and sobbing about how poor they are. What all persons of common sense and good will must be engaged upon sooner or later in this argument is: reduction of the obscene cost of health care, as charged by Big Pharma, by gouging drugstores, by doctors, by hospitals. The Ontario government is nearly broke. If health care like drug costs keep heading toward the roof, the only people without a patch on their impoverished asses will be pharmacists toodling by in their Ferraris.

The Ontario government is going to cut the cost of generic drugs in half and ban the obscene, cushy “professional allowances.” Let’s be clear and honest. Those “professional allowances” are crybaby kickbacks. The burden of those kickbacks are added by generic drugmakers to the cost of generic drugs. Guess who pays? That’s right. You. The pharmacists’ beloved customers.

Notice how pharmacists have taken to calling the customers “Our patients” this week? Makes a feller feel all warm and cuddly now, don’t it? If only those same pharmacists were not such god-damn greedy, squeezing liars.

Fabrice Taylor in the Globe & Mail Report on Business (April 15, 2010) wrote: “The pharmacy industry says the allowances are spent on customer services. That’s clearly not true. Analysts all say that the loss of the allowances will sharply cut profits.”

So, while your salary freezes or disappears in a lay-off, pharmacists want to continue gobbing and swilling at the hog trough of pig glut. What do they want? What every capitalist swine has always wanted: More for me; less for you.

Ads in newspapers and signs in some drugstores claim that, when the Ontario government takes away the 750 million dollars in blackmail (aka ‘professional allowances’) that the government pays to pharmacists to coddle them so they will sell cheaper generic drugs, the poor bedraggled druggists will have to stop all the glorious “services” they perform. Now, if much of that 750 million-dollar boodle scam actually went to providing customer “services”, well, their claim might be true. But it is not. Pharmacists are great big fat liars. That money goes slammo-whammo-presto-greedo right into their obscene profits and into the pockets of big pharmacy chains’ stockholders.

Poor limping granny blown in her rags by the winds of poverty into the front door of the drugstore gets…… not one thin dime.

Certified idiot that I am, am I the only person saying this? No indeed! Check all the coverage of this government/drugstore hissy fit by the best reporter in Ontario presently covering this, Adam Radwanski of The Globe & Mail, Canada’s newspaper of best record.

One more quote from the Fabrice Taylor article: “These legal kickbacks put a lot of money in the jeans of Shoppers shareholders – $150-million annually, according to one analyst. But even Mr. Schreiber knew that revenue was at risk. It was nice while it lasted, but it's over now. Move on.” (Mr. Jurgen Schreiber is the CEO of Shoppers Drug Mart).

To conclude, I have many problems with the government of Dalton McGuinty, but not on this move. This is an attempt to reduce the bloated cost of drugs in Ontario. Big drug companies and big pharmacy chains are heartless greedsters. Like monster vines climbing, burgeoning, choking the light from the garden of health, they must be cut back by the razor-keen machete of fiscal prudence.

Remember too, pharmacy has a history, not entirely unflecked with shit.

Ontario Pharmacies: Pigs swilling at the glut trough

2010-04-13T19:15:00.003-04:00

Greedy drugstores

Are you an Ontario pharmacy customer who’s been bitching for years about the high cost of drugs and the gouging, high dispensing fees charged by pharmacists?

Well, now the government of Ontario is trying to reduce the sickeningly high price of getting pills from your local pill pusher.

For god’s sake and for the sake of your wallet, support the Ontario government as it now attempts to lower drug prices and to eliminate some of the blackmail money that Ontario pharmacies receive for selling generic drugs.

You have already heard pharmacies pleading and begging that they are being sent down the road to the poorhouse. Nonsense. Twaddle. Lies.

Don’t let greedy liars in white lab coats bully you with bullshit statistics.

When Rexall starts charging for home delivery of their overpriced drugs, just tell Rexall that you will never enter a Rexall store again. Go elsewhere. And tell the greedy squeezing bastards you’ll never buy another Rexall product as long as you live.

Of course, most Canadian drug consumers are sheep – lazy, frightened sheep just waiting to be bullied and cowed into obedience by giant international drug companies and corporate drug chains.

Yet, all customers have to do is one simple act: stop buying anything at your local pharmacy if it’s busy canceling services and hiking fees.

That’s all you have to do. Find a drugstore that is not gouging you and trying to scare you.

Pharmacists, for the most part, are millionaire business people of the lowest moral order. They have one of the sweetest business scams going and they are shitting their pants in fear that they might lose the unfair advantage they have over desperate customers.

Do you know one poor pharmacist? Or does your pharmacist have four cars, three homes and a son at Harvard?

Are dispensing fees fair in any way? Last week I took in a prescription from a dentist for a special mouthwash to act against gingivitis. It comes in a small sealed bottle. 9 bucks for the mouthwash. 11 dollars for the dispensing fee! I asked the druggist what he did to earn the 11 dollars. Snickering he said, “I turn to the shelf. I pick up one bottle. I put it in a small white bag. Presto 11 dollars!”

Out-fucking-rageous.

Every pharmacy in Ontario gets a suckhole subsidy from the Ontario government for the horrible burden of selling reasonably priced generic drugs.

These criminal sleazebags want to gob and swill at the hog trough of glut forever. Every pill should cost 20 bucks each. Pharmacists should have 6 houses!

Perhaps you disagree? Well then, do something about it.

You should help the Ontario government reduce the cost of prescription drugs, introduce more generic drugs, and cut out the blackmail money presently paid to Ontario pharmacists.

All it takes is a little spine, Ontario. Most of you are not going to die if you miss a week of your prescription. What did your grandfather do when he went to town twice a month and got his medicine. Did he die? No. Neither will you.

But after a couple of weeks of no sales, just watch those dirty, greedy pharmacists run, yelping and squealing like the pigs they are, whining and begging you to return to their stores.

What do I prescribe that you do?

Easy, it’s time to start saying to big pharma: fuck you, fat cat!

Stephen Harper Sells Poison Canadian Asbestos to 3rd World Children

2010-03-01T06:29:00.020-05:00

Updated in 2009 & February 2010

Canada’s new Conservative government returned to Ottawa last November, powerful and sneaky as ever. Prime Minister Steve is still letting Canada tell lies about our most toxic export, asbestos. We can’t use it in Canada to build homes but it is perfectly okay for Canada to export the lung-poisoning asbestos to third-world countries. Screw the wogs! Why, they're not even white, are they, Harper?

Difficult as it may be to believe, the government of Canada under Stephen Harper actively sends diplomats and officials scurrying like lying rats all over India and Thailand and Indonesia to assure semiliterate innocents that it is safe to house their vulnerable children in homes in which Canadian asbestos lurks ready to induce lung cancer. This isn’t a matter of opinion. Even the usually fraidycat Canadian Medical Association Journal has come out with a dead-clear denunciation of Canadian asbestos.

Illustration of the Government of Canada's Official Asbestos Policy

Read my article below to see precisely which cancers asbestos causes. Or should I say, the cancers Canada's Stephen Harper allows to flourish.

The coverup about asbestos is to save the one-industry Quebec town of Thetford Mines. The one industry is asbestos. The cover-up is part of Prime Minister Harper’s continuing attempt to coddle Quebec in its cradle as the demanding baby of current Canadian confederation, a baby that screams, “Gimme. Gimme. Gimme,” but has no plans to give back anything in return. It’s just that, this time, the cradle is crammed with asbestos fluff that floats on its deadly flight into the lungs of third-world children.

As Don Martin wrote recently in the National Post (Oct 24/08): “A study by international experts into the cancer risks of asbestos, commissioned with tax dollars by Health Canada, has evolved into a conspiracy of silence that's galling even by this government's paranoid standards of secrecy.

The 4,000-word study was submitted to Health Canada in March for vetting. It still remains classified as confidential pending the completion of the review, even though its findings would be useful at the global conference.” He refers to a conference in Rome this week where Canada was expected to continue trying to block other countries from banning asbestos.”

WARNING: The Pictures in the Ottawa Mirror Are Sneakier Than They Appear.

This is the government you elected Canada, so get used to another four years of vileness, for Harper has gathered round him once again the Cabinet of Thugs, including The 4 Harrismen of the Apocalypse, a familiar circle of bullies plucked from the crew created when Mike Harris took eight years to destroy Ontario.

The whole sick cabal of sneaks and neocon liars came back: the malignant Irish dwarf Flaherty, a traitor who bad-mouths his own province of Ontario; the hypertrophied stumblebum behemoth John Baird, the oaf who can't talk fast and can't talk slow; the automaton Tony “What? Me Feel?” Clement.

Have you ever paid serious attention to Tony Clement's political statements and defenses of Conservative policy over the years and not felt a frisson of revulsion creeping up the back of your neck? There is an ice cube where Clement’s heart should be. Clement could be the poster boy for a whole chapter in a psychology textbook, the chapter entitled “Lack of Affect.”

And Canada’s new Environment minister is Jim Prentice. So we know those tar-sands’ tailings ponds are safe. Fuck a duck, right, Jimbo? An environment minister might logically be expected to consider asbestos toxicity. Have Canadians heard even one syllable that was not blindly partisan from Jim Prentice? No.

Then let Canadians, concerned about asbestos export, seek action from our federal Ministry of Science.

In charge of that complex and serious portfolio Stephen Harper has placed an evolution-denying, born-again chiropractor.

Last week and this week, reporters asked this minister, Gary Goodyear, about his belief in evolution. This so-called graduate of the University of Waterloo could barely frame a cogent answer. Listening to him try to respond was truly frightening. It was obvious he did not understand evolution and Goodyear could barely put together a sound sentence.

Stephen Harper has placed in command of a delicate portfolio, upon which depends the future of Canadian science, a semi-literate chiropractor of breathtaking mediocrity.

But that is the government today in Canada: a herd of run-of-the-mill yesmen who tremble like a cowed herd before the bullying tactics of a control-freak prime minister incapable of delegating the smallest amount of authority to act.

Under Stephen Harper, Canada is fucked.

Our unfuckment will begin when we rid ourselves of his glum burgherdom of Conservative lumpen-nebbishes.

But let’s get back to Canada as peddler of international poison.
And let’s examine another story, deeply touching and moving.

The city of Asbestos is situated in the Eastern Townships of Québec at the centre of a triangle formed by the cities of Quebec, Sherbrooke and Montreal. Asbestos wants to change its name. Asbestos as a town name has become politically dicey, embarrassing, toxic, but chiefly it's a lousy, persistent, economic burden.

Asbestos is a fibrous mineral such as chrysotile or actinolite easily made into long flexible strands formerly used where incombustible, nonconducting, or chemically resistant material was needed, until science discovered asbestos causes cancer in persons exposed to it over long periods of time.

Asbestos has been mined from the gigantic Jeffrey pit for more than 100 years. One of a handful of substances conclusively proven to be a human carcinogen, asbestos causes cancer, big time. Actinolite is a rare form of asbestos whose needle-like fibers make it a potent lung invasive and carcinogen. Other forms of asbestos in the amphobile group are considered especially dangerous because the fibers are hard for the lungs to expel. The amphobile family of asbestos is also more likely to become airborne than the chrysotile asbestos. Asbestos becomes a health hazard when it becomes lodged in the lungs. The major health risks linked to asbestos are asbestosis, a scarring of the lungs; meso-thelioma, a cancer of the lung and chest linings; other lung cancers and nonmalignant lung and pleural disorders. Does science feel this? Think this? Science KNOWS this! Want to read medical proof of the toxic potency of asbestos? Begin at this website for Hazards magazine. http://www.hazards.org/asbestos/

But here for the questing mind to contemplate is a picture of a cancerous lung.

In this pleural mesothelioma, the dense white encircling malignant tumour mass arises, as its name implies, from the visceral pleura. These are big bulky tumours that can fill the chest cavity.

Now the citizens of Asbestos, Quebec, wish to change the name of their fair hamlet. The word asbestos has become tainted in the public mind with nasty things like tumours and death. Awww! One local Quebec official says it’s all because nitpicky Americans have a phobia about asbestos. Not quite, mon vieux. The word phobia implies an irrational and unfounded fear of something. Fear of asbestos is about as rational and smart as a human being might get. So you can dump the phobia palaver. The danger is real, monsieur.

In 1989 asbestos was banned. Too late, as usual. Widely used during the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s in various building materials as a thermal insulator for walls, flooring, ceilings, insulation, roofing, fireproofing and automotive products, asbestos dust was also found in packaging and even wallpaper tiles and various other acoustic soundproofing products.

Now that most North American and European construction legislation has banned totally the use of asbestos in human habitation, what have Canada asbestos miners and manufacturers done with 95% of our Canadian asbestos? Guess! Sold it and shipped it off to the third world to use in its building projects, markets in Thailand, Singapore, Brazil, India and other developing nations.

Most of Canada’s toxic asbestos goes to Asian countries. But it’s all okey-dokey, say the many government-sponsored “safety” agencies. The asbestos industry says it promotes safe use of its products, and that the deaths and disease caused by asbestos use in the United States and Europe during the past century will not be repeated elsewhere in decades to come. Modern manufacturing processes are well-ventilated, producing minimal dust, industry defenders say. But medical experts worry that workers in those countries ultimately will develop lung afflictions that will sicken or kill them. Asbestos critics scoff at such safety claims. They cite unventilated factories in Brazil and other places. Some offer as proof slides of children in India exposed to dust produced by men sawing asbestos. Though there is deep disagreement over the current safety of and need for asbestos products, both sides on this debate agree on one thing: Asbestos can kill.

Still we have our petit problème in Quebec. They need a new name to cover up what has been mined there for more than 100 years. Local suggestions include Trois Lacs (Three Lakes) and the upbeat Phoenix, wherein locals hope the guiltless town will rise again, squawking and flapping its asbestos-dust-free wings as it soars through Quebec skies to glory.

Your humble deponent, Bill Casselman, would like to offer some new names too, just to be hell-pful. How about Sweet Lung, Quebec ? Or Pas de Cancer icette, mes copains? We could go for the nom faux-aborigène. You know, make the town name sound like an ancient Iroquois burial ground and redub it: Mesoquebecoma.

Thug Tactics by Asbestos Lobby To Intimidate Critics

2008.

It is not enough that the thug owners and thug Canadian workers don't care if they are mining material that is going to poison children. Now they hire goons and enforcers to try to frighten and bully anyone who criticizes the asbestos industry. Check out this story from the pages of online Hazards Magazine:

"Asbestos is still a money-spinner, and the industry is investing in a major promotional drive to protect its trade in chrysotile (white asbestos). But it is not limiting this global campaign to product marketing. It is resorting to threats and the courts to harass campaigners for an asbestos ban.

A meeting of anti-asbestos campaigners in Thetford, Quebec, had to be cancelled this year after industry thugs “threatened our worker contacts with violence and firings,” a Canadian union activist said. Union campaigners at the World Health and Safety Congress in Korea in July 2008 were provided minders as the atmosphere soured. Asbestos industry association speakers at the congress made defamatory attacks on union and asbestos disease campaigners. And international delegates to a February ban asbestos conference organised by the global building unions’ federation BWI found the hotel lobby festooned with pro-asbestos materials on their arrival. Delegates were intimidated at the conference and, in some cases, on their flights home."

Any action by Canada's so-called national police force, the RCMP, on these illegal and criminal intimidation tactics? NO! Not one nano-second of police work to apprehend these pro-asbestos scumbags. Is the noble RCMP in the pocket of Big Asbestos? Who knows? Maybe it is time for the many organizations who don't want Canada selling poison asbestos to the world's children to find ways to take the asbestos industry to court, to fight back with legal actions against these poisoners? Last time I looked selling known poisons was a teensy-weensy bit illegal.

Etymology of the Word Asbestos

Merriam-Webster’s Third New International Dictionary,Unabridged (2002) gives a superb etymology quoted below:

“Middle English asbestus mineral supposed to be inextinguishable when set on fire, alteration (influenced by Latin & Greek asbestos) of albestron, probably from Middle French, alteration (probably influenced by Latin albus white) of abeston, from Medieval Latin asbeston, alter of Latin asbestos, from Greek, unslaked lime, from asbestos inextinguishable, unextinguished, from a- not(alpha privative)- + (assumed) sbestos, verbal of sbennynai to quench, extinguish; akin to Lithuanian gesti to be extinguished, Sanskrit jasate he is exhausted and perhaps to Old High German quist annihilation, Gothic qistjan to destroy, Tocharian B käs- to pass out of existence.”

Before we get to a review of the criminal apathy of Stephen Harper's Conservative government in regard to asbestos, we'll continue our asbestos story with a medical diagram for your delectation and perusal.

Stephen Harper Happy to Insure That Canada is an International Poisoner of Third World Workers

Anything to make a buck is the motto of our disgraceful Canadian Prime Minister, the same slimeball, son of an oil executive, who says Alberta Tar Sands Are Healthy & Wonderful.

Think I’m just a bitter old nutbar?

Read what Harper has done recently to promote the killer Canadian Asbestos. Here is an update by concerned anti-asbestos activists at Right On Canada. The final material below is quoted from a Right On Canada emailing in February 2010.

Help Stop Harper’s Asbestos Exports

We need your help to defend the human rights and health of impoverished workers around the world – from our own Canadian government!

Prime Minister Harper refuses to listen to the world’s leading health experts, like the World Health Organization, which says that use of asbestos must stop in order to save lives.

Instead, he allows the asbestos industry to set Canada’s policy. He is right now giving taxpayer funds to an aggressive asbestos lobby group which pushes sales of asbestos in developing countries and assures them it is a wonderful product they can safely use.

Because of our credibility as a country, Canada is the most powerful asset the global asbestos industry has.

This lobby group (the Asbestos Institute, now re-baptized the Chrysotile Institute), with Harper’s support, succeeded in sabotaging the UN Rotterdam Convention and prevented the listing of chrysotile asbestos as a hazardous substance. This is great for sales, as it means Canada’s asbestos industry can sell asbestos in developing countries without having to tell them it is hazardous.

It is a shameful blot on Canada’s reputation that we put the industry’s wishes ahead of human lives.

Asbestos is like a land-mine. It goes on killing for generations.

Workers around the world are dying from Canada’s asbestos. In fact, workers in India (where Canada ships most of its asbestos) have made a direct appeal to Prime Minister Harper to stop this heartless and cynical policy. He refuses to listen to them.

That’s why we must make him listen and make him stop exporting asbestos death in our name and with our money.

In his latest Cabinet shuffle, Harper appointed his most aggressive promoter of asbestos, Christian Paradis, to the powerful position of Natural Resources Minister.

Mr. Paradis is Canada’s “Asbestos Czar” because of his close connections with the asbestos lobby and its industry-funded pro-asbestos scientists.

RightOnCanada.ca is at the forefront of a Canada-wide and truly international effort to stop Canada’s asbestos exports. We are working with doctors, experts, trade unionists, environmentalists, and human rights activists around the world.

This month we co-operated closely with workers in Mumbai and Delhi who confronted Quebec Premier Jean Charest during his trade tour to India over his province’s appalling asbestos exports.

Stephen Harper and Jean Charest don’t seem to care about the painful deaths and cancers caused by Canadian asbestos – but I know that you do.

We will continue to inform journalists and the Canadian public about Canada’s unwanted distinction as the world’s fourth largest asbestos exporter (after Russia, Kazakhstan and Brazil). Using our links with experts in Canada, pressure will be brought to bear on the government to ban the export of asbestos. And we will work in solidarity with allies in other countries.

Our country is turning into a worldwide human rights abuser, not a human rights defender.

If you want to contribute to this worthwhile anti-asbestos campaign, visit their website by clicking below.

www.RightOnCanada.ca

Canada is the pond. Stephen Harper is the pond scum.

2009-12-31T16:29:00.005-05:00

THE YEAR AHEAD

Harper & MacKay: Vile Liars about Torture

2009-11-25T15:41:00.015-05:00

Zap that Ay-rab Dick! Make 'em Scream "O Canada!"

Torture Those Camel-humpers! Is that the voice of your Canada?

It’s the screaming voice of our warmonger Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

What torture! Mon Dieu, Canadians would never turn over prisoners to be burned with cigarettes! Is that the seeming opinion of Harper’s Bully Squad led by his Minister of Defense, Nova Scotia Tory hack and liar Peter MacKay?

LIAR

Is there anything Peter MacKay won't say for fear of not getting his invitation to the Christmas Ay-rab Beheading at 24 Sucksit Drive?

What kind of torture are we talking about here? Really heavy stuff or just Disembowelment Lite?

Recorded sadism includes: blows to the testicles, inoculation with dog diseases, near-drowning under wet towel until you gag or have seizure,shaking Stephen Harper's hand. Nothing major. Same stuff that happens in the back play room at a Tory party in Ottawa to anyone who disagrees with the PM.

Beefy, toilet-seat-faced liar John Baird and Harper’s goon squad of toxic mutants have now been ordered to try to discredit one of the only honest men in Canadian government, diplomat Richard Colvin.

Colvin stated that all prisoners handed over to Afghanis by Canadian troops were likely tortured.

Colvin sent documents stating this to Peter MacKay, Minister of Defense.

MacKay has been caught having to admit that, yes, documents were sent, but now the thin creep denies ever seeing such reports. Of course. All the top people around Harper knew about the torture. And, true to form for this government, they are all now lying about it.

According to a new poll, 50% of Canadians believe Colvin. I guess the other 50% voted for Harper.

Did Harper and the rest of the pro-torture scum in Ottawa know about the broken fingers, the acid poured on penises? Sure they did!

And these are the filthy liars you elected to run our Canada into moral and reputational ruin. A crazed warmonger for a prime minister, surrounded by the vilest, cruelest crew of liars ever to lizard-crawl out from under government-protected rocks. Shame on Canada! Shame on the conservative morons who elected these tawdry men and women who are a growing embarrassment to all Canadians of good will.

Can’t any of you remember when Canada could hold its head high proudly in any council of nations as peacekeeper to the world?

Of course, the Tories want us to be Americans. That is Stephen Harper’s dearest pillow wish: "Dear Goddy, never mind the rapture. Jes' make me President."

So who cares, anyway? Right? They’re just Ay-rab enemies getting a knitting needle propelled up their anus. What's a punctured colon, after all, except a mild spell of fecal peritonitis. I mean, shit, Dude, what a suck! Peritonitis still gives you a couple days to live.

Besides, former leader in Afghanistan, Smiling General Rick thinks torture is part of war. Funny, the Geneva Convention that deals with war crimes doesn’t agree with Smiling General Rick.

But there was General Hillier this afternoon at the hearing trying to discredit totally a diplomat who was upset by what that diplomat learned in Afghanistan. Hillier slammed Colvin and said Colvin had no knowledge of the campaign.

This is Hillier's familiar bully soldier trick. No civilian may comment upon the war at all or Hillier will jump down his throat. Well, this is Canada. ANY civilian may comment on your murderous tromp through my country's history.

Watching on television, in case you are interested, Hillier, you Americanized saluting-machine, I did not believe one fucking word you said.

But what I did smell was army cover-up by means of brutal yelling and table-thumping.

Well, fuck you, General! I, like one half of this country of Canada, suspect god-dam well that you were saving your ass by lying.

You are the last kind of cowboy that Canada needs - ever.

You may have fooled some of the unthinking morons who stand mooing on overpasses saluting corpses, but you don't fool me. YOU are the cause of those corpses speeding down the 401, pal. And you can stick a couple of corpses right up your military ass.

It seems that handing over prisoners to certain torture is actually a war crime. Now there's something Canada can dream about: The Liar Harper in the same prisoner box as other international war criminals. "MEIN FUEHRER, I CAN WALK!!!!"

Liar

But, fuck all this crybaby noise, let’s start a new memorial highway, okay, pious Canadians? You doughheads that groove on mindless memento mori, let's gather bleating on the overpasses.

Let’s call this one: The Highway of Dupes or Avenue of Shattered Screams.

Let's compose major pop songs to sing, as rigs packed with excised fingers and toes roll by to Canadian hotdog factories. Everybody now, sing loud, sing proud: "O Canada, I just cut off a hand. O Canada, ain't warm blood grand."

Don’t do anything, Canadians. Just stand there and practice baaing.

A small voice from the crowd: "Taliban scum today! Canadian welfare recipients tomorrow!"

O brave new Tory world, that has such creatures in it.

Soupy Sales: A Farewell to Larmes

2009-10-23T16:42:00.017-04:00

Soupy gets his head scratched by his dog White Fang.

Thursday, October 22, 2009: One of the people who made me laugh hysterically as a young teenager died today at Calvary Hospice in the Bronx, New York. Soupy Sales was 83.

How do you thank a man who gave you a thousand, thousand laughs?

Soupy Sales showed a young me that laughter was a highly appropriate response to a good deal of what fate might dish up in your face. This is my modest addition to his memory.

“Oh-luh-uh-Oh” bellowed White Fang, the large mean dog, so big we kid viewers only saw one giant paw as it slammed into poor Soupy Sales’ head and knocked him off camera.

Innocent Soupy came back on camera, his face, smiling, beaming widely, but bearing Soupy’s trademark look of astounded wonder. Soupy said, “What was that? Do you hate me, White Fang, doggie of mine?

Remember we kids viewers only saw the paw of White Fang, like Soupy’s head, in big close up. BCU in old television tech. talk, borrowed from film scripts.

The paw dropped in a fake mope gesture and White Fang sulked. “Luh-uh-uh.”

Soupy perked up. “Okay, White Fang, I forgive you.”

This time White Fang’s paw bunched into a fist and slammed Soupy square in the kisser. “Awwwww, can’t we be friends, White Fang?” begged Soupy.

White Fang emitted a suspicious, non-commital “Luh-uh.”

Soupy smiled as widely as humanly possible. White Fang smashed the cream pie directly into Soupy’s forehead.

Soupy with White Fang's paw and puppeteer Clyde Adler. A behind-the-scenes photo I'm glad we kid TV watchers never saw. As an old TV producer, I note the old Zoomar Extender on the lens, clicked on so Soupy's BCU will be in focus.

When I was 14 and my brother was 13 in the mid-1950s, we roared along with “Lunch with Soupy Sales” and later “The Soupy Sales Show.” We watched it on WKBW, a Buffalo TV station, where it came live at noon on a limited ABC Saturday network feed from its originating station, WXYZ in Detroit.

Before he went full network, Soupy had the lowest budget of any kids’ show in America. Most of the show was a medium-wide shot of Soupy’s kitchen, a tatty cardboard set, whose walls swayed and bulged every time an actor walked past it. There was the infamous backdoor at which Soupy received his only guests. Beside the door was the wall buzzer with the sign above it: Do Not Touch. Every show the buzzer rang.

The budget was so low, only two persons could appear on camera, Soupy and his long-time puppeteer and collaborator, Clyde Adler, creator of White Fang (bad dog), Black Tooth (good dog) and Pookie the Lion. Clyde was the puppeteer behind Hippy the Hippo and Marilyn MonWolf. Clyde was also The Man at the Door. Basically, Clyde was everybody on the show who wasn’t Soupy.

There was never a studio audience because the set and the set-ups were so cheap, they would have been embarrassing. But "no studio audience" was perfect for the early Soupy. The two guys and the Detroit TV news-and-weather crew shooting the show had thirty minutes of surreal silliness each show. Compare honest Soupy to the wheedling treacle of Buffalo Bob on Howdy Doody, smarming the kiddies like an old queen up her last alleyway and so arthritic she can barely lift her skirt one last time. Buffalo Bob was a symphony of cringing, lickspittle pleadings all of whose subtexts were “please, please like me.” The smarter kids in the Peanut Gallery on Howdy Doody always knew that Buffalo Bob was a phony-baloney suck.

Whenever one of Soupy’s solo flights of silliness had petered out, there would come a knock at the back door and viewers would see usually only the two arms of the visitor, almost always in the early days of the show, puppeteer Clyde Adler’s arms.

Of what shticks, pratfalls, slapsticks, whoopee cushions, rubber chickens and wheezy old gags did the Soupy Sales Show consist? Whatever they were, their cheapness, their showbiz tawdriness, was my chief delight. Soupy lip-synched badly to crappy pop songs. Screamingly funny because of Soupy’s facial takes. Soupy’s pie-in-the-face smile told viewers that anarchy did indeed reign in his world. But he couldn’t help it. He loved being alive and fifty setbacks per day were NOT going to waylay our Soupeleh. He did not have a mean bone in his body. Shucks, he and we just happened to be trapped in this shoddy little earth space; yet he loved it although it was insane. If you, the viewer, would shrug your mental shoulders, then you too could learn to love it.

Pookie the Lion, an arm puppet at the window: “While you were away, Soupy, a guy came to the door and wanted to see you.”

Soupy: “Gee. Did he have a bill?”

Pookie: “No, he had a nose just like you.”

That joke was ancient even in the earliest days of vaudeville. But Soupy’s beaming delivery brought it back to goofy life.

A Bit of Biography

Although I knew none of this when I was 14, here’s a swatch of internet potted bio:

“Sales was born Milton Supman in the tiny town of Franklinton, North Carolina, on January 28, 1926. He was the son of the only Jewish family in a town where his father's dry goods store sold sheets to the local branch of the Ku Klux Klan. The family's name was so often mispronounced as "Soupman" that his parents jokingly nicknamed his brothers "Hambone" and "Chickenbone," bestowing on him the name "Soupbone," which was eventually shortened to Soupy.

After fighting in the Pacific in World War II and participating in the invasion of Okinawa (while honing his comedic chops aboard his ship's public address system), Sales returned and began his entertainment career in 1949 in Cincinnati, where he worked as a morning DJ and did stand-up in local clubs. By the early 1950s, he did stints as a script writer at radio stations in West Virginia and Cleveland, while moonlighting as a stand-up comedian and DJ and moving to Detroit.”

Soupy at his Detroit home base TV station. Note the lenses mounted on a sprung, hand-turned turret. I think the cameras are an old Westinghouse pedestand and an RCA ped runner.

Why We Loved Soupy

My brother and I screamed with laughter at Soupy’s smiling acquiescence to dire predicament. One of the reason’s he was funny was the very looseness of the performance. Although some of the jokes were on cue cards (which Soupy often showed to the camera) Soupy was never up tight or nervous. Shit happens, he seemed to say, and you gotta roll not with it, but IN it. Oh my!

My brother and I loved Soupy because of this guileless anarchy. Whatever happened got laughed at. Nobody else on TV could do Soupy’s insouciance or even come close to it. Only 1950s TV watchers will remember the carnival of Halloween death-doll masks that appeared on television then: live-from-the-grave Ed Sullivan, Dinah ‘Phony-as-a-Recorded Fart’ Shore (No, Dinah, YOU go and see the USA in your Chevrolet), Perry Como (“Folks, Honest, I only put a little Thorazine in my Old Spice Aftershave”).

Bunch of stiffs.

But Soupy was alive and kicking and, of course, was a blessedly inane dipstick.

Only one other comic ever made me laugh harder and that was Curly in “The Three Stooges” barking his animal sounds as beautiful women scorned him or authority figures dismissed him. As a dorky teenager, I identified like mad with both Soupy and Curly.

In the mid-1950s Soupy’s off-the-cuff, anything-goes style was new to TV.

Did Soupy, a noble pioneer, pave the way for Monty Python and Saturday Night Live and yadda-yadda-yadda? I don’t know but I suspect not.

Soupy Sales was the sole proprietor of his very own lunatic kitchen.

His death today made me remember how many glum November noons he brightened with his unique brand of existential nonsense. Whatever else Soupy accomplished on earth, he showed two Canadian boys that, yes, the world was crazy and funny and full of shit, but those qualities did not give the world ANY immunity and we were free to laugh at it. The indifferent cosmos gave no fecal exemption for earthlings.

Rockin’ good advice, Soupy.

Wherever you are, thank you, sir, for a million crack-ups, fallings-down-on-Casselman-living-room-rugs, amid bursts of immoderate laughter so deep that mildly embarrassing personal misfortunes of a urinary nature once or twice befell a certain onlooker.

Soupy performs his famous mouse dance.

................................................................

Saturday, Oct. 24, 2009

Hey Bill:

That was a great tribute to Soupy....your digression on Buffalo Bob was hysterical and it re-kindled memories of sitting at Jacob’s ice cream parlour downtown and watching Howdy Doody at 4 pm......and then home to watch Sagebrush Trail at 6 pm on WBEN TV from Buffalo.

Soupy was so funny to us....what a simple format as you have shown with the photos of staging...

They had so much fun doing those shows...there would have been a lot of ad-lib...I will try to get some video clips of an old show on internet..

Talk soon.

“Oh Lo-Oh Lo....” WHAP !.....( pie in face)

- Your Brother

Olympic Winter 2010 Medals Just Unveiled! Gosh!

2009-10-15T15:24:00.015-04:00

Nazi Vancouver Cops Can Now Break Into Your Home, Grab Anti-Olympic Signs and Haul You Off to Jail for Six Months

British Columbia’s and Vancouver’s deep love of fascist tactics never seems to end.

As of last Thursday, the City of Vancouver, softly peeing its municipal panties, is worried that anti-Olympic protest signs might cause the noble athletes to get all nervous during the upcoming winter games. Those trembling athletes after viewing a street sign that says, "Down with the Olympics" might just inject their illegal, performance-enhancing steroids into their dicks instead of their arms. Golly!

On the other hand, such a procedure might save them the cost of a Viagra pill taken just before the hourly Olympic Village nude orgy.

So, believe it or not, in the same city that let four Mounties electrocute a Polish visitor, the slimeballs of Vancouver City council have snuck in a bill that would allow those same trustworthy cops that murdered the Polish visitor to break into any house in Vancouver and find bad, bad, bad signs and jump up and down on those bad signs and, well, just tell those darn protesters that they are going to jail for six months and paying a 10,000 dollar fine.

That is an outrageous breach of a Canadian’s civil liberty.

Now Canadians can’t even be against something as stupid as these foolish winter games. There are many people like me who think the Olympics is an obscene corporate money grab. It should be titled: World Youth Drug Trials.

This proposed Vancouver law ought to be cast out of council chambers and relegated to the bin of bad policy, the same bin in which are kept all shameful laws.

- bill casselman

Brain-Dead Tattoo Urge Explained

2009-10-04T10:39:00.013-04:00

*
*

Why People Get Tattoos

Much pseudoscientific, sociological drivel has been written about tattoo acquisition. I don't think it is at all mysterious.

If one has no identity, if one can accomplish nothing early in life, if one's low intelligence and milk-and-cookies-milquetoast personality cannot contrive an identity or at the least cobble together a ramshackle selfhood sometime after puberty, well then — never fear — the feckless, zero-sum doofus can go out and buy an identity and wear it home on a t-shirt or under his left tit.

The tattoo of frisky sperm on his left testicle may proclaim some brain-stem to be “a, like, totally awesome rebel.” Yeah, right, duuuude.

Earth residents are preponderantly moronic and it eliminates the need for I.Q. tests when some of them label themselves with tattoos.

This is an excerpt from my etymology piece on Tat: The Tattoo & Trash word.

If you liked the paragraphs above, check out that column on my website.

*
*
*

Readers Write:

October 28, 2009
Dear Hater,
I enjoyed reading your segment on "why people get tattoos," found under the
world word "Tat." I had some good laughs. You have a great sense of humor.
However, since you clearly stated that we may feel free to send you e-mail,
I have a few suggestions and try to forgive my poor grammar--I'm in a rush:

1.) It seems that you enjoy mainstream media. I know this because you say,
"why people get tattoos," thus, the reader can affirm that your opinions
and, God forbid, intellectual conversation following the heading should
apply to all people with tattoos. However, to formulate an opinion based on
mainstream society and celebrities and then deem it true to all proves your
love and devotion to mainstream, regardless of your respect for their
decisions, or in this case, lack thereof. Perhaps you should dwell upon how
fine of a line exists between Lindsay Lohen's "shhhh" tatoo on her finger or
the classic meathead's tribal "tat" vs. a successful NASA aeronomical
engineer's "Do the Right Thing" tattoo on his forearm, or a spinning image
of a diceased sibling tattoo'd over one's shoulder blade. This may come as
a surprise, but not everyone is concerned with how others accept him or her
as individuals. Therefore, my first suggestion before you change the
heading is to pull your head out of the sand and possibly consider coming
back to Earth. I love the use of vocab, though!

2.) Change the "Why People Get Tattoos" heading to better fit your content.

3.) Ok, so let's face the facts, you're trying to make money. Hopefully
you're doing a great job (heck, you got me e-mailing you!). Aside from your
interesting content of the origin of words, mainstream drivel may drive more
traffic than bland, intelligent fact. I understand that your website is
concerned with the origin of words, but is the unethically sarcastic
tone/content of your discussions the route you wish to take? You can always
stay mainstream and prove a real, responsible point (or two!). This
attracts more respect to yourself as an individual, considering the brand of
you as an author and your website involves your full name. Doing so may
also hint that, while you may not respect humanity, you don't wish to
contribute to its "preponderantly moronic" ways. All the above being said,
do you not agree that the better path is to disect maintstream for its
absurdities while contributing some type of reasonable statement of your
own? Doing so may create a credential for people to depend on, ensuring
their support.

Today, we see haters all around the world. To hate is not to simply
disagree. Haters are people that attempt to spread their beliefs/disbeliefs
to others (and may even succeed). But the most important aspect of the
"hater" is their ability to "hype" a subject and carry it forward as a
world-class discussion. The topics that seem to fade from world interest
and our History books are the topics that lack haters. So allow me to thank
you for making the world go 'round. We need your type.

Maybe just clean up the content, for your own sake.

Regards,
W. Chase McArthur

P.S. Hope you enjoyed my "I'm in a rush" excuse for poor grammar

..........................................................

Vanessa emails:

I went ahead and read the full article... My husband and I are both what you might consider 'tattooed'. He holds a PHD in neuro psych, while I have a bachelors in Painting and a Masters in Art History. Oh, and I am a tattoo artist. I will admit I spend a great deal of time talking people out of terrible ideas that I know they will regret later n life (we tell every person wanting a name, only get the name of someone you are related to by blood).But the majority of people I tattoo are intelligent and aware. I just gave a physicist his first tattoo last week. Also, I think it is important that you know that 90% of those in the tattoo community do not really like the the words "tat" or "ink". We also don't like the term "gun" when referring to tattoo machines. Quite honestly I found your opinion generally uninformed.

Also, in anthropology, tattooing as a tradition is found on every continent. I could therefore make the argument that, for some people, there is an inherent desire to modify ones body. Your lineage may have come from an un-tattooed tribe. Who knows? Maybe, most importantly, you should simply stop passing judgment on those who are not like you.

Posted by Vanessa to Casselmanual at November 26, 2009 11:58 AM

Bill Casselman answers Vanessa Nov 26 2009 1:21 pm

I see. So we should believe someone who makes money from tattooing others that punching holes in your epidermis is an ancient and noble art.

As for me, one who disagrees that it is totally healthy? Well, Vanessa tells me "to stop passing judgment on those who are not like you."

If your PhD neuro in psych (whatever THAT is, I don't believe one word of it) did what you recommend, dearie, all scientific inquiry would cease.

Ever hear about Newton? About Einstein? They challenged what people who were not like them believed. They refuted the scientific orthodoxy of their time. Just as I refute the brainless yahoos who walk around having permanently blotched their skin.

That's how humanity progresses, by challenging the validity of what most folks do.

The majority of tattooed people are NOT intelligent and aware. They are crackheads, criminal scum and frowsy, drunken losers. My psychological insights into SOME tattooed people are from widespread and numerous psychological studies.

By the way, if you have a Masters in Art History, girlie, I will eat it. If you do, it certainly did not feature any training in logical argument.

You have quite a streak of fascism in you too. So, members of the "tattoo community" will tell us how to speak and how we ought to refer to them? Really. Sort of like White Supremacists and fascist groups do, eh? No thanks, Brunhilda. I think you and the Thought Police can move on down the road. Maybe you can catch a squirrel and tattoo it and record its screaming?

So far, Canada and the USA are democratic. So, pardon me, Vanessa, but I do not think I shall be handing over to the likes of you and your branded cohorts the right to think for myself, to report broadly accepted scientific evaluations of self-mutilation or any other body-marring shenanigans that you painted nutbars get up to.

his mark,
X

(Bill Casselman)

*
*
*

Roman Polanski Case: No Such Thing as a 13-Year-Old Slut

2009-09-28T18:27:00.018-04:00

A Few Ideas You May Not Have Considered

In the Recent Arrest of Roman Polanski

Isn’t it a wonder that in all of human history there has never been such a thing as a 13-year-old slut?

The Story as of September 28, 2009:

Mr. Roman Polanski was arrested in Zurich by Swiss police, on the basis of a warrant issued in the 1970s by the United States. Polanski initially admitted guilt in 1977 and spent a short time in an American prison. He then fled, took French nationality and has since lived in France, where he is protected from extradition. But Switzerland has a hazy, woozy extradition treaty with the United States. It appears that Polanski’s lawyers will attempt to fight the extradition order in Swiss courts.

One of the political strands of this story not written about often is Switzerland’s historic role as neutral lickspittle, as cringing international suck-ass, as lispy-lipped non-participant pantywaist in anything that might get its Swiss clock cleaned.

The role of stand-offish virgin is one the Swiss perfected throughout World War Two. Switzerland kept murmuring sweetly how neutral it was, meanwhile accepting into its obscene yawning vaults tons of Nazi gold obtained by melting Jewish dental fillings. The Swiss are dirty cowards. There can be no forgiveness for their breath-taking, soul-withering hypocrisy or their obdurate greed.

Remember, you little raclette-slurping snow gnomes, carving a statue of Moses in butter for the Zurich Dairy Fair does not constitute a Wiedergutmachung. Putting Golda Meir upsidedown on a Swiss stamp will not earn you God’s smile. Switzerland, you are slime through all of history.

Nowadays Switzerland is checking its underpants for brown spots almost daily. Switzerland wants to curry US favor because the USA taxation department, the IRS, is about to destroy its vast, hugely profitable secret Swiss bank account scam that has helped the world’s bloated moguls to stash hidden money, to hoard pelf and to shroud boodle in unnamed Swiss bank accounts for decades. Switzerland fears more USA reprisals and boot kicks, so it tosses a sop to vindictive, arthritic Uncle Sam, namely, one old Polack to pop into jail. This time, one of the world’s greatest film makers, Roman Polanski.

Yes, Polanski got a 13-year-old damsel drunk at Jack Nicholson’s Hollywood mansion in 1977 (Jack wasn’t there) and then had sex with Anne of Nude Gables. I, for one, do not approve of child abuse or sex with minors. Sex with miners is a totally different story - - - always remember to bring Listerine and strong soap.

The girl, now a healthy successful woman, whom Polanski sexed, has for years begged the Los Angeles Police NOT to continue their harassment and attempts to nab Roman Polanski. The intrepid inquirer can only speculate on WHY this woman would want to totally forgive Polanski. After all, the hulking beast raped her? Didn’t he? Jumped right on her, bumped his uglies, and destroyed her life forever. Well…maybe not.

What puzzles me always in adult/child sex cases can be stated simply: isn’t it a wondrous happenstance that in all of human history there has never been such a thing as a 13-year-old slut?

Ain’t that wonderful? The 14-year-old vixen who accidentally rubs her bikinied pussy against Uncle Walter’s leg at the Baptist Praise Jesus pool party does not exist. Such unnatural and foul lusts have never besmirched happy days of innocence and freedom. During all the quirks and oddities of sexual encounters in history, underage females have never whistled the come-on to randy old male goats.

All men are beasts and should line up around 12 years old to have their dicks cut off.

No 13-year-old apprentice harlot has ever waved her pert bum in grandpa’s face. Nope. Angels down to the last stick of Juicy Fruit gum.

No embryonic slattern ever cooed provocatively into a hairy ear, “Oh, Uncle, I can’t reach my see-through g-string. Could you tie it for me, pretty, pretty please. If you do it for me, I’ll suck you off so good you’ll think you stuck your dick in a Martian vacuum cleaner.”

“What?” says shocked Uncle. “I hope I didn’t hear that.”

“Don’t shit me, Gramps. You heard. And for 50 bucks, I’ll rim you,” purrs Little Boo Pee.

Of course, an adult male or female must have self control and is totally responsible even if propositioned by a child. Psychological and social bullshit.

Now, Your Honor, you may ask: are there any exculpatory bits of evidence? Nothing can excuse an adult raping a teenager. If it happened. But just what had America the Beautiful done for and to Polanski? We can't blame America for the fact that Roman Polanski's mother was gassed by the Nazis at Auschwitz, can we?

Wellsirree Bob, let's see now. There was the modest incident of the Manson gang (doped-up Yankees all) who broke into his house and sliced open his pregnant wife, gutted her like a hog. Would that, Your Honor, tend to have a somewhat unstabilizing effect on a normal man? Just to make sure, Your Honor, you corrupt, doddering, sclerotic old hypocrite, let's do that to your wife and see what happens to you in the years immediately after her disemboweling.

Polanski pled guilty to some hanky-panky, made a deal with a US judge, and then became paranoid that Ol’ Judgy might jus’ fergit zactly what that deal was. So Polanski fled the home of the grave and the land of the okay-if-you-got-bucks, flew to France and became a French citizen.

Another American hate strand now enters the story. Amurrican heroes hate France, because, when that godsend to humanity, George W. Bush and the filthy, gasping Cheney, told everybody in the world to go forth and shoot Iranians, France said no. Thereby France earned the almost eternal wrath of America. So the L.A. Police Goon Squad says to itself: We play this smart, men in blue, we gonna kiss some major Washington ass here, boys. We’ll grab that little moppet-diddling Polack and we’ll piss off France and make very happy the yoyos in the Fed who supply some of the financial support to our Los Angeles Police Force, particularly important now that the golden state of California is flat busted broke.

So, when next you view the LA constabulary apes stratching their asses and smelling their paws, remember there are many, many reasons for police action. Some of them are corrupt.

Watch some of Polanski’s best film work:

1962 Nóż w wodzie (Knife in the Water)

1965 Repulsion

1966 Cul-de-Sac

1968 Rosemary's Baby

1974 Chinatown

2002 The Pianist

Could I possibly be asking for special consideration for Roman Polanski, just because he is a great artist, more sinned-against than sinning?

Abso-fucking-lutely!

* * * * *

Addendum by Bill Casselman Sept. 29, 2009

This morning, Canada's national pro-business newspaper, The Globe & Mail, let loose its shrieking coven of man-hating, toxic female writers and told the girls "Git Polanski!"

First up was some cowardly matron charged with scrawling a suckily anonymous Globe editorial just crammed with man-hate. The solemn editorial deliberately omitted details about how fraudulent Polanski's first trial was. The Globe editorial clerk-typist cared not one whit about the kangaroo-court atmosphere of Polanski's original trial, overseen by a corrupt, publicity-seeking judge (Gonna git me a movie star and a Jew!), a Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office prosecutor who gave the judge instructions on how to sentence Polanski (!!!) and the sluttish girlie who accepted bags of Polanski money that has permitted her to loll in Cleopatrical sumptuousness ever since.

The Globe & Mail states plainly that such abuses of American justice mean nothing. Go after Polanski and bag him like an Arkansas squirrel on stew day. It's the Amurrrican way! And we all love Amerika.

There is not one iota of cogent proof that Polanski's crime was indeed child molestation. There is heavy suspicion that when he fed champagne and Quaaludes to Little Miss Muffet and then had both vaginal and anal sex with her, it was nothing new to her. Mommy or her pimp smelled big Hollywood bucks. That's what may have happened.

This was a so-called "aspiring actress" whose mother or parental entity let a 13-year-old girl attend a "photo shoot" in the sole company of an older male at a Hollywood castle. Nothing weird there, gullible schnooks, is there? The mother never had an inkling that she might be pimping her daughter, just to get hold of some movie money. Of course not!

And what a pious true-blue tower of adolescent integrity the girl was. Within minutes of arriving at Jack Nicholson's Mulholland Drive mansion, Lolita is posing topless and swigging champers. So then she fought like a tigress to defend her young virtue....well maybe that line MIGHT not apply? What about the words "teeny slut," would they apply here?

How, by the way, did Wee Jenny Wren get to Jack Nicholson's Hollywood mansion and end up, so-to-speak, in the hot tub's lubricious bubble bath? Oh, she just happened by, while selling Girl Guide cookies and asking at the door, "Thay, Mister Man, what's a peeeeeeeeenis?"

"Justice is a simple thing," drones the magisterial Globe, shaking its withered dewlaps at all who would disagree. The Nurse Rachett who penned that editorial piffle does not seem to understand that the judicial procedures in the Polanski trial were a criminal sham.

To the Globe editorial page: shame on you. But it is no surprise that, as always, Globe lips protrude as they approach American anus. Let's keep them Yankee tycoons happy. After all, look what they did lately for the world's economy!

Next out onto the jittery and mortgaged vaudeville stage of Globe & Mail misandry galumphs pop writer Lynn Crosbie, or, as I, a regularly appalled reader refer to her: She Who Walks by Night. Wee Lynn, butcher knife in hand, metaphorically lifts Polanski's robe to see if anything swinging can be lopped off. Lynn thinks it dreadful that some men might like 15-year-old girls. Had any lessons about male sexuality lately, Lynn? Mistress Crosbie fails to mention the boodle Polanski paid Samantha, the non-slut girlie, so she could repose in sybaritic luxury.

Crosbie then bids Polanski to stand up like a man and take his punishment. Lynn Baby will, no doubt, secure docket seats for that event. Bet she can just hear those Jew testicles go splat on the floor.

Now it is time for the Globe and Mail to seek the redress of newspaperly balance, to try to find one of their male writers who does not type in a tutu and lace panties, to write a few paragraphs from a point of view other than Lynn Crosbie's mouth-corrugating hatred.

- - - bill casselman

* * * * *

September 29, 2009

V. writes...................

"You wonder why the girl doesn't want him prosecuted? 'Cause he paid her a ton of fucking money in settlement of civil suit and gave her a life no hot little number could ever imagine. There was just this summer a documentary on HBO about Polanski and the judge really did fuck him up. The judge reneged on his deal with P's lawyers because he was getting media heat for the 45 days sentence. Watch the video if you can; the judge is exactly as you describe him.

I agree with all you say."

* * * * *

Stratford Ontario Shakespearean Actors Can't Talk

2009-08-22T09:39:00.018-04:00

About the 2009 Season
of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Ontario, Canada

By Bill Casselman

Thursday, August 20, 2009

I have attended hundreds of different performances at Ontario’s Stratford Shakespeare Festival since the 1950’s. I remember the tent beside the river. I remember Bruno Gerussi as Julius Caesar.

I remember the first day! I was a precocious eleven years old. Invited by his friend Tyrone Guthrie to join in the premier season, Alec Guinness lived for a brief time in Stratford, Ontario. On July 13, 1953, Guinness spoke the first lines of the first play produced by the festival (Shakespeare’s Richard III): “Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun of York.” And I remember my first star sighting: Alec Guinness riding a bicycle along a bank of the Avon River one summer morning before a matinee and graciously stopping to autograph a young boy’s souvenir program. I have it still. He was kind enough and crafty enough NOT to ask a boy on a mid-summer morn about school. Instead Alec Guinness asked me what I most liked to play at during “the hols.” I didn’t know what that meant. He explained. I replied that vacation meant paper route, swimming and playing cowboys in the reedy banks of the Grand River.

I remember mighty performances, among the best — Christopher Plummer as King Lear, where thought and actorly attention had been paid to every single line of the text, as Plummer’s intellect moderated his superb stage technique. It was the theater-going highlight of my life. A great actor had THOUGHT about every line and every movement he would make in the play. The Stratford company of stumblebum tv-rejects could not even keep up with Plummer. He buried them. Talk about premature burial. Plummer buried them before they came out on stage. It is always the eternal problem with “a company of players:” half of the no-talents couldn’t read an eye chart, let alone enunciate iambics.

Granted, such theatrical moments are rare. Another, not at Stratford but in Toronto, was Peter Brooks’ 1970 all-white wonder-circus of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Again, every actor knew what every word he or she spoke meant. The play abounds in the sweetest sounds ever to flow from the lips of men. When the high poetry of well-known passages was needed, the actors did not try to scuttle or capsize the poetry or its renown by throwing away the lines. They gloried in Shakepeare’s word cascade.

On the other hand, Stratford actors choose or are instructed to scuttle poetics in every play. It is deeply fucking annoying. Directors bid the actors to toss overboard the poetry, because they know their cast cannot perform it. For largely the same reason, directors may airily decide to set The Tempest in an Albanian pencil factory during World War Two. But why on earth do that? They hope displacement of venue will disguise inability to speak Shakespearean verse with aplomb, with ease, and with poetic flair.

Even this summer, an otherwise journeyman job of Macbeth by Colm Feore was poisoned, as Feore took every famous passage and sank it with deliberately prolonged and unnatural pauses, deflationary delivery and all the other shabby tricks of the thespian who knows the audience knows the lines and their delight in the words must be destroyed somehow, so that the audience will not be able to judge just how poorly the actor is delivering the known lines. This tattiness is SO counterproductive to good theater.

These familiar lines in Macbeth are well-known because they are lines of the greatest poetry ever written in English. So, here we are together in a theater, and what does Colm Feore as Macbeth do? Everything in his stage power to render the soaring poetry as flat and stale as he can make it. Fuck you, Feore! I paid to hear the poetry, not to see you wag your dick, you pompous buffoon. No matter what you think, lean little Colmy, you do not know Macbeth better than Shakespeare did. So shut the fuck up with your gulps and neck-twistings and insertive pausings and let me hear the poetry!

Now I know this drab-on-purpose delivery is a so-called “modern” style. It’s supposed to make Shakespeare more realistic. Realistic! Ghosts and fairies and Ariel and Puck. Shakespeare is not realism. It is high poetic drama. Another reason for the flat delivery of Shakespearean lines is a reaction against the excessive declamatory speech-style of Victorian and Edwardian actors. But that was long ago, kiddies. Present-day directors and actors have gone too far to the other extreme, where not a shred of the bard’s verbal beauty is permitted to be heard on stage. To many audience members, including me, this abandonment is a huge piss-off.

May I suggest that next summer the whole Stratford company of actors tries something new? Deliver the poetry, as poetry: sweet, mellifluous, dulcifluent. You actors, do not run and hide from musical English, but instead let us hear it, every sonorous syllable of his honeyed verse, spoken in melodious rills of utterance ? Do you know what would happen? Pleasure. The pleasure of the poetic text heard by the audience. Not the annoyance of the audience listening to Colm Feore try to derail the engine of every great Macbeth speech. You did not make the speech more realistic, Feore. You just covered up the poetry with plebe-tongued gibberish and prole Band-aids.

Do you know why actors prefer the staid, club-footed approach, the sounds-like-real-speech approach to Shakespearean delivery? Because it is easier to do than learning to speak exquisite poetry. One can even hear some rump-fed scuzzoid thinking, Screw that high-falutin’ talk. Oberon oughta sound jes’ like he were born in Watts. No, he should not, you semi-literate, Ebonics-honking guttersnipe. And, until you learn to speak theatrical verse, get the fuck off a stage I am paying for!

Now to this season at Stratford, Ontario: mediocrity’s parade. A Lady Macbeth played by an actress so awkward in the mere enunciation of English sentences that the theatergoer could watch her straining just to pronounce a rich, complex Shakespearean pentameter, straining to make lips move, lips that had never paid any attention to English words before, except as a dialect slur, a Lady Macbeth who had not the slightest idea of what the words she uttered meant, so unused to speaking clearly that it was an evident, painful burden for her to even form and speak aloud polysyllabic English words. Outrageous! And the management of Stratford wants Broadway show prices for us Canadian sheep of the audience to watch this untalented woman learn how to speak our language. Out-fucking-rageous!

It was not as bad as the effeminate Macbeth a few seasons ago, where the audience feared not that a lisping Macbeth would stab Banquo to death, but that he would fuck Banquo to death.

I will not go on, except for this final thought. What is missing from most productions at Stratford, Ontario is any sense of urgency to succeed. We are subsidized, they seem to whisper. So it doesn’t matter if the play fails. And the director is the bumboy of someone in Stratford management. So he gets a get-out-of-jail-free card too, no matter what abortive stage slop he turns in this season. Consequently, everyone is under-rehearsed. Scant thought is paid to meaning, delivery, technique. Even the sets are getting shabby at Stratford. Did you notice Mark Antony standing to give his Roman funeral oration this year on - - - unpainted plywood!

What I do not understand is: what exactly did these amateur stumblebums who comprise the majority of the Stratford company, what did they learn to do in theater school?

They can’t speak; they can’t move; they can’t understand complex texts.

Of course, they have the other unfortunate burden of being — ugly. Yes, these little gardens of effeminacy and acne will never get to act on television. But if they are going to parade about the theater world sticking their snotty little nose-jobbed noses in the air and proclaiming that they are too sensitive for the vulgarities of television and film, these effete Geiger-counters of mincing delicacy, they might at least learn how to speak and move on stage, sometime before they charge us one hundred dollars per seat to watch their cow-tongued and butterfingered revels.

Bill Casselman

..........................

P. K. replies to this column:

My friend Wendy, a brilliant Shakespearean actress, sent me this note on
Facebook after I made her read your rant: "I'm going to marry your friend Bill Casselman - make him come to New York!"

Reply to this blog

Sandy said...

Let me guess the word of the day.

Is it 'OLD'?
Or 'CROTCHETY'?
Or 'POMPOUS'?
Or 'BITTER'?
Or 'UGLY'?

Your name dropping, profanity laced 'review' says a lot about your character, and none of it is good. I certainly wouldn't want to know you, let alone sit next to you at the theatre.

In these times when arts are struggling we need people who celebrate them- that does not mean they shouldn't have critical commentary, but this long winded diatribe is unwarrented.

Do us all a favor and crawl back under whatever rock you came from.

August 22, 2009 2:20 PM

Old, Crotchety, Pompous, Bitter Bill Casselman replies:

Dear Sweet Little Airhead Sandy –

Thanks for telling us the method by which we make things better at Stratford.

Keep lying, eh, Sandy-Wandy. We should celebrate the arts even when they are defective shit.

My diatribe is precisely warranted. The actors must learn how to speak.

Keep being a ditsy asskisser and spend the rest of your life looking out through pulled-over wool.

Yours for truth,

Evil, Lizard-Like Bill Casselman

August 22, 2009 4:40 pm

Another reply:

L.P. emails: " Now this is the Bill we've all grown to love.
How refreshing to read a contrarian critique.

Would that we'd seen Macbeth this year. Well, perhaps not. "

ducKy Boyd said...

Rockin'! Nice to see someone with the balls to say it like it is. I much prefer to see Shakespeare done "classically", not in this "modern interpretation" nonsense. It's more interesting and makes you LISTEN, whereas this "let's make it current" crap turns it all into spectacle and takes away from the words. Good on ya!

August 25, 2009 12:49 AM

Anonymous said...

This rant reminds me of a joke. A wag is walking down the street, smoking a pipe when he is approached by a homeless man for change... to which the wag replies:

"Sorry my good man... Neither a borrower or a lender be. William Shakespeare." Said the wag with a patronizing grimace.
To which the homeless man responded "Fuck you, you fucking cocksucker... David Mamet."

But I must admit Colin Feore's "Eubonic" approach to classical text has gotten out of hand... the night I saw Macbeth... instead of the dagger speech he just said "Yo I gotz ice this Motherfucka' 2night, I gotz to get paid." Added to this his incessant use of the "N" bomb when referring affectionately to Mc Duff, indeed any of his cohorts was slightly jarring... and doing a major disservice to the poetry... although I am a big fan of random expletives like how they are use in this article... I think Colin Feore should "De Blackify" his cadence... when Christopher Plummer would add a swearword or two to Shakespeare's work, it was often "Fucking queer" or "Silly Cunt".. something very caucasian, hence more in tune with "the Immortal bard of Avon's, TM" intentions...

August 25, 2009 8:36 PM

"Amusing and racist rant" wrote, about this piece, J. Kelly Nestruck, Theater Critic, Globe & Mail on Twitter.

"The racism completely detracts from his argument." Says Sol Chrom on Twitter.

Sol, my little brains' trust, the racism IS my argument! Bill Casselman

Keith Thomasek runs a pussyfooting, suckhole website called FestivalReviews. As long as the opinions are timid, well-behaved, brief, and not terribly well written, Keith vets and allows them on. Keith got in touch with me recently. I wrote a 1,000 word column (the one above) especially for his site. He read it and could not bring himself to publish it, because it spoke frankly about black actors at Stratford this summer who can't speak English sentences, never mind enunciate Shakespearean verse. Dat be baaaddd! U mus nebber say dat.

Our tinted brethren are always correct and always talented; to imply otherwise is utter racism. Is that how we shall make these actors learn their verbal crafts? I think not.

What is left of Keith's heart is in the right place. But it is now obvious what will not be allowed on FestivalReviews, namely, any insights that are vivid, bold and corrective. Kiki, like so many other amateur thumb-twiddlers, crouched on the edge of Canadian showbiz trying to find their balls, can't.

by Bill Casselman August 27, 2009

Bye-Bye to Bush: Moron and President

2009-01-16T07:01:00.009-05:00

Topical Special:

Inter pygmaeos regnat nanus

Cocking a valedictory snook at George W. Bush: war criminal, violator of the American Constitution, inflictor of torture & common fool

I hereby bid an unfond farewell to a shabby president, a rightwing, born-again buffoon who, with help from his stumblebum neocon myrmidons like the obscene gasping Cheney, did such great damage to America. Persons of good heart now hope that Obama may be able to undo some of the harm these unsavory demagogues and criminals inflicted. My bye-bye highlights a useful Latin proverb you may wish to keep in your verbal quiver of invective.

George W. Bush: inter pygmaeos regnat nanus

My translation: “Among pygmies, even a dwarf can be king.”

Its semantic match is found in a similar proverb: In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. It is a nifty putdown of any bad leader.

***

Casselman's 2008 Winter Reading List: Godless Filth

2008-11-30T13:51:00.023-05:00

############
############
############

Uncle Billy’s 2008 Roundup

“It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it’s the parts that I do understand.”

Mark Twain (1835-1910)

I know, I know. You are proud that you have never had a thought that wasn’t cleared by your church, your legion, your government, the I.O.D.E. or Don Cherry. But just suppose there existed other vagrant thoughts floating through earthly brains, little teeny thoughtlets that Billy Graham and Stephen Harper did not approve of.

Could any of those thoughts be worth thinking about for, say, a few minutes? Or, if you considered such notions even briefly, would the trapdoor spring open and send you down the diabolic chute to the Everlasting Garburetor.

Be brave this winter.

Try a new thought.

The best book I’ve read in the last decade is The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris.

From a review by Natalie Angier who has written about atheism and science for The New York Times, The American Scholar and elsewhere: “…The End of Faith articulates the dangers and absurdities of organised religion so fiercely and so fearlessly. . . Sam Harris presents major religious systems like Judaism, Christianity and Islam as forms of socially sanctioned lunacy, their fundamental tenets and rituals irrational, archaic and, important when it comes to matters of humanity’s long-term survival, mutually incompatible.

A doctoral candidate in neuroscience at the University of California, Los Angeles, Harris writes what a sizable number of us think, but few are willing to say in contemporary America: “We have names for people who have many beliefs for which there is no rational justification. When their beliefs are extremely common, we call them ‘religious’; otherwise, they are likely to be called ‘mad,’ ‘psychotic’ or ‘delusional.’

“To cite but one example: “Jesus Christ - who, as it turns out, was born of a virgin, cheated death and rose bodily into the heavens - can now be eaten in the form of a cracker. A few Latin words spoken over your favourite burgundy, and you can drink his blood as well. Is there any doubt that a lone subscriber to these beliefs would be considered mad?”

The danger of religious faith, he continues, “is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy.” “. . . A zippered-lip policy would be fine, a pleasant display of the neighbourly tolerance that we consider part of an advanced democracy, Harris says, if not for the mortal perils inherent in strong religious faith.”

Bill Casselman adds: That’s my problem with a tenet I grew up believing: let other people enjoy freedom of religion. Never criticize believers’ religions. I would not do so – even today – except that I think those believers may destroy the earth I live on, during coming protracted wars of almost total idiocy.

So I ask: is it too late in the face of humanity’s fragile grasp on earthly survival, too late in the war-dense history of the world to permit freedom of religion?

My answer is yes.

Humans live beneath a precarious bell of doom.

We are about to be gonged back into stardust.

Do you want that to happen because people who worship a lunatic carpenter are fighting people who think that when men go to heaven they have orgasms that pour forth for 10,000 years!

10,000 years of gushing semen?

Holy doodle!

If I met Allah, my first question about his heaven would be: “Sir, may I please have the Kleenex franchise?”

One fallback position: let them hoot and rave beneath their moonlit crosses, wild dogs barking at thunder, as they await their improbable resurrections, but keep them away from governance of our dear, endangered planet. Keep them out of Ottawa, Washington and all the legislatures of the world.

You just saw what they did when you abandoned American politics to all the born-again bigots - - they elected George W. Bush, one of the most disastrous presidents in American history.

Canadians are now watching another born-again nutbar, our very own sub-Prime Minister Stephen Harper, galloping Canada at full rein into the hands of Mars, the war god.

So, atheists, next time, vote early and vote often.

Here then is my very own list of books and websites that might open your mind to the blessing of a world free from Judaeo-Christian guilt and Muslim paranoia and jealousy.

Recommended Winter Reading

These ten books explore atheism from many perspectives. Sam Harris is devastatingly good on the illogical nonsense of believing that crucified Jewish carpenters who never existed can return from the dead in the form of thin bread wafers and Thunderbird wine.

Underlying all these books is a simple axiom of human life: Science is the only way we can know our earth and ourselves.

Science is merely an English form of the Latin word for 'knowledge,' knowledge gained through the human senses, through evidentiary rules of science, and through common sense. The idea that a senile, vindictive, elderly Palestinian shepherd father-figure (aka: god) is sitting around on a cloud, figuring out new ways to make humans cringe and toady and crawl is preposterous! Yet that's what god says in the deeply silly Old Testament: I'll smight you and smack you and cream your ass, humans. Then, just for good measure when you're rising to your feet, I'll smight you again! The most familiar utterance of the Christian god is: Where's my sacrifice!?

We gain knowledge of the world and ourselves not through superstition, not through worshiping giant stone toads, not by sacrificing goats and children on stone altars, but solely through science validating common sensual information. Science repudiates as impossible Christian circus tricks like resurrrection-on-demand.

Look up reviews of these books on the internet.

Make sure to read positive and negative reviews.

Then read the books themselves.

The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and The Future of Reason by Sam Harris

This is the most intelligent assault on religious belief ever written.

Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris

This is a much shorter presentation of Harris' views, presented in monosyllables so that even born-again evangelicals have a chance at understanding atheism.

3.
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins offers the chilling analysis of a world-renown scientist about why religious belief is folly.

Why I Am Not a Christian – Bertrand Russell (available free on the internet; short, pungent, bright, a excellent short intro to atheism; do note, Christians, that, if you read it, your fingernails will turn black and fall out.)

The Skeptic’s Annotated Bible (online only)

Details the thousands of simple errors enshrined in Holy Writ. For a book written or inspired by the Almighty, the Bible is chockablock with stupid mistakes of every kind. Do type this into Google and read some of the holy howlers that pious people still swear are "the God's truth."

The Skeptic’s Annotated Book of Mormon (online only)

The Skeptic’s Annotated Quran (online only)

Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel C. Dennett

A great philosopher explains why one cannot be wise and be religious at the same time.

God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens

I LOVE Hitchens! He goes after the slobbering born-agains with a vigorous intellectual hatchet and chops the rancid flesh of their rotting faith into mincemeat. Plus: he's a lovely wielder of English expository prose.

For a nasty, rightwing dismissal of Christopher Hitchens by one of the leading bigots of American intellectual life, gasp as you read the New York Times review of Breaking the Spell by none other than the editor of The New Republic (!) Now there is even-tempered editorial assignment of NYT book reviewers who might be expected to give the author’s viewpoints, at the least, a fair hearing. Warning: that last sentence contained liberal irony. The web page address below is no longer available. But you can dig the review out of the New York Times online newspaper morgue for a few bucks or find it at a library.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/books/review/19wieseltier.html

10.

The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever

By Christopher Hitchens

Hitchens collects some of the great atheist manifestoes and screeds and puts them into their temporal context and their place in intellectual history. Here is an enlightening trip around the world of human thought that shows bright minds of every age and every nation have had qualms, definite moral and intellectual qualms, about the preposterous lies of all world religions.

That's my ten list for this winter. In all humility I say: be like me. As winter bellows across the snowy pasturelands of our dominion of Canada, I'm snuggling under a blanket to read by the winter fire. Next year we're putting in a fireplace!

This year, have a Happy Thinking Holiday!

Try it. You'll like it.

Bill Casselman

Passchendaele Movie Reviewed & Remembrance Day a Scam

2008-11-15T13:46:00.040-05:00

XXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXX

Thoughts on Remembering War

Prompted by Watching

the Canadian film “Passchendaele,”

a few days after Remembrance Day

a November 2008 essay by Bill Casselman

excerpt: “The entire film is acted and choreographed in a style that S.J Perelman used to call “fire in a whorehouse.” In the trenches of Paul Gross’s “Passchendaele,” exploding corpses zoom through the air until trench warfare resembles a field rehearsal for The Flying Wallendas.”

Summary of this 3,200 word article

1. A review of the Canadian war movie “Passchendaele”

2. Remembrance Day as blackmail: haven’t we remembered enough?

3. How pro-battle sentiment influences Canada’s Afghanistan policy

Film Review: Epic as Difficult Story Mode

Paul Gross’ mediocrity as a writer sinks his movie “Passchendaele.” Gross is an actor whose success in television has permitted him to assemble the money to make a movie and to surround himself with merdivorous toadies and softly cooing yesmen who spaniel after him all day whispering, “You’re a genius, Paul. Really. No, truly, I mean it, dude. Sincerely, you are a god.” Shucks, thinks Paul bashfully, maybe I am.

On this project, Gross was in dire need of people unafraid to offer judgment, people who could read the Grossian scenario and say to him, “Paul, this is bad writing. It’s soap opera; emotional hooey; the improbable piled on the unlikely; crocodile tears mixed with rancid treacle. In short, pal, unbelievable crap.” But no such corrective purveyor of impartial analysis was permitted within ten feet of our aging golden boy.

And Paul Gross could not have picked a harder row to hoe.

When a mediocre writer tackles epic form, the result is disaster, but, of course, disaster on an epic scale.

The epic that works as immediate art and endures the usual disdain of the ages is scarce in all media throughout history for a very cogent reason. The epic is among the most difficult modes of the storyteller’s art.

Ask yourself: why is there seldom more than one great epic story in the entire long history of a nation?

Ancient Greece had one resonant war epic: The Iliad. The Odyssey is a sentimental travel fantasy, ultimately about running home to Mommy who awaits you, tits out, but dressed as your wife, Penelope.

Rome had The Aeneid, pro-imperial political propaganda disguised and “pseuded up” as poetic history.

In English, the war of battlefields is replaced by the war between spiritual good and evil, giving us a masterpiece, the high-water mark of English epic poetry, John Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Cinema has few successful epics. Each moviegoer may keep a very short list. My list of effective film epics includes David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia,” Coppolla’s “The Godfather: Parts One and Two,” Sergei Eisenstein's “Ivan the Terrible,” John Ford’s “The Grapes of Wrath” even though Hollywood softens the rigour of John Steinbeck’s story. Perhaps I’d add Terence Malick’s “Days of Heaven” and William Wyler’s “Ben Hur.”

What all of the above epics began with is: compelling story masterfully written. But Paul Gross is no Steinbeck. His tepid concoction of First World War clichés is watery broth indeed.

Scope out this wee plotlet: Wounded Canuck is sent home from WWI battle, back to early twentieth-century Calgary. Soldier Boy meets Miss Angel Glow, a nurse. Their love is thwarted by cruel fate, including Angel Glow’s TRAGIC FLAW. She’s a nurse addicted to morphine. In one of the most pathetically inadequate scenes of “Passchendaele,” Soldier Boy rescues Angel Glow from the flesh-wasting, eye-hollowing clutch of morphine by locking the damsel up in a Calgary roominghouse bedroom and hugging her all night. Angel Glow, shaking off the equivalent of heroin addiction, never cracks so much as a bead of sweat, but stays improbably as peachy-cheeked as a pre-Raphaelite madonna. Paul Gross, wrestling the evil drug that has imprisoned his sweetheart, never even musses his 200-dollar razor-cut hairdo. I know it’s a movie but – for corn’s sake: muss the silly fucker’s hair a little bit. Spray some sweat on Angel Glow for a moment.

In the morning the Alberta sun shines brightly through the tattered blinds of the cheap hotel and ---behold, o happy fate! — our solider boy has kissed Miss Dopey Veins to a cure. Hey, after all, rehab is a snap, right? I mean, half of all movie crews have kicked the cocaine monkey, so, gimme a big wet sloppy kiss and everything’ll be all better.

Then, by a happenstance badly written and ineptly conceived, Soldier Boy, drummed out as a wounded soldier, goes back to Europe to fight again. And in the trenches, one day, totally out of the blue (except in a Paul Gross script) who does he meet? Why it’s Miss Angel Glow, nursing away, morphine-free, and so he does what all soldiers would do in the midst of bombs blowing up, mud-choked gullies of torrential rain, rifle fire everywhere killing his buddies: Soldier boy grabs Angel Glow, yanks her into a shed and pumps her until she squeals like a bagged squirrel. Ain’t love grand?

The entire film is acted and cinematically choreographed in a style that S.J Perelman used to call “fire in a whorehouse.” In the trenches of Paul Gross’s Passchendaele, exploding corpses zoom through the air until trench warfare resembles a field rehearsal for The Flying Wallendas, a daredevil aerial act of circus days gone by.

The hypertrophied carnage ruins the film. Yet it is presented as positively balletic, as if Diaghilev had slipped blotter acid into Nijinsky’s strawberry milkshakes or denied sex to the entire corps of Les Ballet Russes by not letting them fuck one another to exhaustion every night after Swan Lake, but then finally relenting to permit them to indulge in a fratricidal binge of gut-swagged massacre. It all ends in a visually comic mess with pretty well everyone dead except for the shell-shocked who are playing mud bunny in the Belgian ditches. Not once did I feel regret or loss.

It Makes a Feller Proud to be a Faggot

Whether or not their inclusion was designed to make Paul Gross appear even more manly than he is (thurely that can’t be pothibble?) there are a goodly number of young actors in this film with 20-inch reflexible wrists, purring and lisping away, to no discernible purpose. Anyway, guess what? War ‘n’ fightin’ will make those suckhole little pantywaists into real men, who can then bravely return to Alberta and do what real soldier men do: become alcoholics and spend the remainder of their days in sodden nostalgia guzzling suds at the Legion or leaning against bar-room walls, stiff as boiled owls, all bleary for the golden days of war yore when they bit through a kraut’s eyeball. Oops. That too was left out of this war film.

The casting throughout is jaw-droppingly appalling. Old stage hams like Jim Mezon lumber hulkingly on camera, wooden as Jim Flaherty’s heart. Mezon is allowed to shake his fat wattles yet again in one of his dreadful charades as an evil, British-acccented Canadian officer. I thought the Shaw Festival had passed a law that Mezon would never again be allowed to drag that tired old act on stage or in front of a camera.

Let us Leave the Art of Acting to Trained Seals

So. Paul Gross can’t write. As an actor, Paul Gross is passable on television, where high def veils mediocrity in a polychrome spritz of pixels. As anyone who watches an evening of current television can attest, clarity can be empty. Clarity may cheat by containing nothing but definition and no other content. That’s what we viewers get most nights on TV:

focus designed to fuck us.

Paul looks like a lumpish, once-kinda-cute male model whose career specialty might have been Canadian Tire work shirt ads. But Paul Gross is not “big” enough to inhabit cinematic space. He will never be a movie star. There is no radiance, no magnetic aura which even the dumbest real movie star lunkheads possess. Think of that brainless, no-talent smirk of narcissism that is Brad Pitt. Showbiz fate is dirty. Fate is mean. Fate is unfair. Paul Newman had it. Paul Gross never had it and couldn’t give it away with free boxtops of Lovely Head Male Shampoo. When the camera moves in close on that bland Grossian face, cosseted by years of self love and far too many facial massages, and sees those unreflective eyes in whose limpid pools no thought has ever dogpaddled, the moviegoer sighs and feels — nothing.

So. Paul Gross can’t movie-act.

A Flea Circus Would be Too Large a Venue for Paul Gross as Director

Paul also directed this collapsed soufflé. He gives the other inept actors not clue one about how to save bad writing. Most of the actors can’t speak in a realistic manner anyhow and have no idea what to do when the nasty camera moves in for the truth-telling close-up. Arm-flailing is big in this movie, and is so overdone that, by the end, the group scenes are reminiscent of an outbreak of spastic hypertonia in a flamingo colony. Will you please keep your arms down, actors, so we can watch your bad facial expressions!

Cheating on the “Cheat Scenes”

Other directorial decisions that make the viewer reconsider breakfast include his “cheat scene” choices. Cheat scenes arise when one can’t get the desired shot, so everybody pauses to consider how to “cheat” it, a common, perfectly legitimate filming procedure. Of course, it helps if the cheated scene works for the story. One egregious flub in “Passchendaele” has Soldier Boy and Angel Glow perched erotically on a cliff top high above a winding Alberta river as sunlight bathes the rolling hills in a pre-lust glimmer. For whatever reason, the framing of the shot omits to show the moviegoer precisely what the lovers are sitting on. The camera is set way too high. There are many modes in which to photograph the rolling hill country of Alberta, but “shooting down” is NOT one of them. A high camera angle flattens all the features of the landscape that make it resonant. The angle of the shot of the two lovers actually makes the viewer uneasy. We can’t see what they are sitting on. Are they going to fall off? Is that a rock upon which they perch? Jeepers, when he grabs her left tit, will Angel Glow plummet over the declivity and scuff her Revlon lips on the way down to a watery bye-bye? One can only hope. But we are not shown.

That whole scene is strictly amateur night. Professional moviemakers catch such errors on location as they watch after-shot replays. Perhaps Gross was too busy checking his haircut. But, Paul, don’t worry. Throughout your movie, you look darling, dear, simply darling. The only way you failed in “Passchendaele,” is as director, producer, writer and actor.

Part (2)

In Flanders Fields, the Blowhards Blow.

Remembrance Day?

Haven’t We Remembered Enough?

Canada has a century-long reluctance to ask any ironic or analytic questions about war, about Canadians who wage it, about those who demand that we keep remembering it, demand that Canadians kowtow forever in obeisance and bury any misgivings under a fool’s comforter of plastic poppies.

Are soldiers the only people who ever mattered in Canadian history? Dead soldiers killed in wars? Did World War One create modern Canada? Is that how Canadians came to define themselves? By killing people? So say historians like No-Star General Jack Granatstein. I say “General”Jack is full of shit. I say inventing a way to make insulin to help diabetics is one beacon that, woven with other positive advances, helped Canadians to define who we are. Not knifing krauts in the mud.

But tedious old bores like enemy-stompin’ Jack Granatstein want people to remember constantly for many reasons. One of Jack’s reasons is so that the vengeful old hawk can get the funds to keep building war museums. Every time a Canadian turns around, history professor Granatstein has wasted our taxes by building another god-damn war museum, filled with the same exaggerations, lies and exclusions we’ve been subjected to for decades. Jack’s jingoistic blatherings about our glorious soldiers (Jack being a soldier, by the way, and thus partaking of the glory he seeks daily to generate) always remind me of another well-known Canadian, a movie director who never stops whining that Canadians don’t celebrate Canadian artists with sufficient noise and glory. By which this movie director meant: Canada has not celebrated ME and my talent enough. Oh really, well, here’s one Canadian reader and writer who thinks we’ve heard quite enough immodest horn-blowing from both Norman Jewison and Jack Granatstein.

Is there one nano-crumb of proof that Remembrance Day EVER stopped the next war? Not one.

Every single participant in a Canadian war was a hero who wants only to be celebrated every day of every month forever. Well, that’s quite remarkable. I guess the two families I know best are the only families in Canada’s war history who contained grifters, losers and what I call veteran conmen. Let me tell you about two.

One relative I will call my “Uncle Stan.” Tragic figure. Uncle Stan came home from WWII with shell-shock. The whole family of lesser, war-deprived beings got down on their knees and kissed his beer-stained puttees. Just awful that shell-shock. Made Uncle Stan gulp down a quart of Captain Morgan’s rum every day for the next forty years — just for ballast.

“You Gutless Pussies!”

Uncle Stan loved to blare one-upmanship routines at all the younger males in the family, along the lines of “You gutless pussies never had to flick open a kraut’s carotid artery and make sure it stayed open. You can never be men.” Uncle Stan, wreathed in a boozy aura of rum, used to lean down and scream this into the face of a nine-year-old boy who was not even an embryo when the war began. How do I know? That little boy was me.

After 10 years of his delirious dick-wagging, braying out "Taps" on a tin whistle, all the while lying under the dining room table and screaming abusive taunts, a relative and I finally looked up Uncle Stan’s war record, seeking innocently to understand Stan's tragic neurasthenic deficits all the better.

What did we discover?

Uncle Stan had spent the entirety of World War Two as a typist at Comox on Vancouver Island.

So I asked Uncle Stan finally, “How precisely did shell shock afflict you? You mean, the bombs went off in Japan or the South Pacific and traveled under the ocean all the way to Vancouver Island and then – O God! – shook the rum bottle right off your typewriter table there in Comox? How tragic! Is that what really happened, you useless, lying, bullying waste of protoplasm? I guess that’s why your chief accomplishment after the war was maintaining a 40-year-long alcoholic stupour?

We copied Uncle Stan’s glorious war record and mailed it to every member of the family we could locate. Why? Lest we forget.

Inebriate Number Two, Advance and Be Recognized!

Another lifelong boozed-up souse and member of my family, Cousin Bozo, had deep dents in his forehead in 1946, which he always pointed out on every Remembrance Day. “I fought and was torn apart, so you yellow-bellied suckababies, cringing at home, could enjoy our wonderful Canadian way of life.” Cousin Bozo’s war record was finally researched under the freedom of information act by one of his own children.

Bozo had two notations of interest. One night in the winter of 1943, after the army camp bootlegger had closed, during midnight check at a maritime basecamp hospital, the enterprising Bozo had been apprehended by military police in the act of licking alcohol swabs off other soldiers’ leg wounds. I’m sure Bozo had expected the Carruthers Medal for Nocturnal Derring-Do. Instead he drew two weeks at hard labour for conduct unbecoming a drunken fucking asshole.

Dents for the Dense

The other tale concerned the origin of Bozo’s prominent forehead dents, which, in later years, he never ceased to claim caused him deep pain and loss of consistent nooky. Bozo’s son discovered that his father's indenture (so to speak) had happened, not dodging Nazi bullets on the cliffs of Dunkirk as Bozo told, but after a night of vomit-flecked indulgence, when Bozo had taken a header off the tailgate of a troop transport truck in Halifax harbour, drunker than a rodeo goat, on the way to the ship that never took him overseas because his head wounds had been serious enough to keep him in Halifax for the duration of the war.

My deep shame is that my family is the only family in Canadian history that had veterans of that kind, cowardly titsucking ning-nongs of the most abject life station. Isn’t that odd? Only my family? I feel so bad. Every other Canadian soldier was a hero.

One thing many of these “professional veterans” will tell you in their cups, should you ask them exactly how much fawning praise and bootlicking do you guys require? They will answer: more, we want more. Because the ego wounded in childhood can never get enough of the healing balm of unending praise, even if it is totally unmerited.

In my life I actually met several honest returned veterans. I always asked what was the Second World War like?

The gist of what both confessed was this:

“The Second World War was the best time of my life. I was a backwoods clod, pining in rural boredom, hot to leave the farm. I’m one farm boy who signed up to escape thousands of nights of prairie darkness because we couldn’t afford a candle; lying alone for your entire adolescence, with nothing to do but hold your dick in your sock and fantasize that Betty Grable, all dressed in white with a physician's parabolic mirror strapped to her forehead, had just grabbed your balls, leaned over, and whispered in your ear, “Cough, dear.” I did chose to get shot at, to get out of a non-place with no books, no challenge, no sweet-fuck-all except a farmer father who wanted me to grow up and be his plough horse. Screw that! So, I yelled, “Bring on those Nazi bastards. Ride over those battlefields, you dyed-blonde, corpse-buggering Valkyries, here I come, Adolph!” World War Two gave me adventure in spades. I got French pussy, Dutch food and German stiffs. I got to shoot krauts every fucking day. It was the greatest, most exciting time in my life, and, after demobilization, my life back in Canada sucked big time. Life was never again that sweet.”

Put that on just one cenotaph, you lying old drunks.

Let’s see that text on the ribbon of the next wreath you lay at the Tomb of the Unknown Liver, you cirrhotic, Cyrano-nosed buffoons.

Canadian Art Too Remains Dishonest or Silent in the Face of Our War Record

In all of Canadian art, there is scarcely a moment of analysis or irony about the whole cumbrous war-remembering machinery that clanks along each year, spewing out plastic poppies and edited memories of warfare. Oh, we have dozens of written passages on the horrors of war, and whole libraries on the unrescindable nobility of every soldier who ever donned Canadian brown. But there is little mention of cowardice, of fragging your own officer, of death by friendly fire, of falling on your own bayonet when blind-drunk.

One Canadian play, filmed once, “Wedding in White” features a couple of nasty old buggers, professional Canadian veterans, who attempt to destroy the life of a young girl once they return from the killing fields. But, aside from that, Canadian writers always end their war novels in a French ditch. Canuck artists seem to pull a shroud of “no comment” over all the beastly enormities committed by returned veterans back here in Canada. There is seldom any attention paid to the unending glut of martial bullshit that veterans' descendants have had to abide.

Part 3

How Harper's Pro-War Sentiment & Government Propaganda

Influence Canada’s Afghanistan Policy

I have written elsewhere about my total disagreement with Canadian soldiers being sent to Afghanistan to be killed.

One recent defense of this useless slaughter came from the lordly hawk, John Manley, such a guaranteed warmonger that Conservative Prime Minister Harper chose a former Liberal cabinet minister,Manley, to write a pro-war report about why we should keep flying Canadians to Afghanistan to be shot. I nearly barfed when Manley was on TV the day he released his report. He actually said that one of the reasons Canadian mothers and wives and fathers should offer up their children to be shot, blown up and murdered was so that Canadians abroad, such as John Manley at some French banquet, could hold their heads high in pride, that Canada too was sending its sons and daughters to die in agony, their guts splattered over Afghani trenches. Listen, John Manley, you pink-eyed snotfuck, send your own kids. Leave mine the fuck alone.

How dare you and that swine Harper ask Canadians to sacrifice their children in unwinnable wars. Alexander the Great could not conquer Afghanistan. The Russian Army could not conquer Afghanistan. But Stephen Harper can?

The whole Remembrance Day charade, in which a nation annually bows in humility before dead liars, plays directly into the hands of the government draculas who will eventually send your children to die. So every time you buy a poppy, like a stunned yoyo, remember that you may indirectly someday finance the death of your own grandchildren. Please consider stopping these government beasts from mauling Canada’s future. It’s quite simple. Stop voting for them.

The old proverb is correct: "the first casualty of war is truth."

And it's the most persistent casualty.

---written by Bill Casselman, November 15, 2008

First Comment

Bob said

Thank you, thank you, thank you! Finally somebody telling the truth. I am a former service member (I refute the term veteran -- the only thing I'm a veteran of is the phony 'Cold War').

While I'm not ashamed of my service, let's be real. I joined the 'peacetime' air force for the adventure and because my old man told me to buck up in school or get a job. I did gain a useful trade -- thank christ I didn't go army.

I have attended remembrance day services for years out of a sense of duty and respect. This one past will be my last. I viewed this year's event through completely new eyes and with with increasing abhorance. It was nothing but a public christian celebration of war (I never realized this before until I started thinking for myself - thanks internet!). The 'ceremony' consisted of the old shop-worn formulatic mentions of the cannon fodder, and then on to the real reason for the gathering, namely the continuing self-aggrandizememt of the remaining vets, (many of whom probably fit the descirption of your two uncles), along with the militaristic jingoism surrounding the current batch of 'heroes in the making' in Afghanistan. Not a word of the millions of innocents slaughtered -- no preaching on the immorality and horrors inflicted by the 'total war' doctrine, such as death camps, terroist bombing of civilians, use of WMD, etc. No firm moral statement calling for reflection on the evil of it all, or a call for it's final demise.

What we got instead were the empty platitudes droned out in a 'reverend Lovejoy' fashion for about 45 minutes of a one hour "production".

Your analysis of the Passchendael movie was bang on. (Wish I had that18 bucks back). Gross was an embarassement to Canada in his 'Dudley Do Right' role in the ridiculous Due South homage to another over-rated Canadian institution. They're just cops fer chrissakes, and increasingly incompetent ones at that -- enough of the hero worship already -- get the hell over it! And that goes for firefighters, ambulance people, etc. It seems anyone with a uniform is eligible for this adolescent adulation. Who's next, Canada Post letter carriers?

Thanks again Bill -- made my day.

November 18, 2008 6:34 PM

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Remembrance Day a Scam?

November 5, 2011

I have recently come across your posting titled Remembrance Day is a SCAM. My only intention is to express my deep disappointment over its content. Given that the only e-mail response you have chosen to post is from Bob, an individual most obviously enamored with your explicitly personal and emotional response, I would like to provide additional perspective.

I do understand the events of WWII to have profoundly affected Canadian identity into the 1950s and beyond, and would be highly skeptical of any suggestion that such a massive social phenomenon would not have such an effect. I am also highly disappointed that you seemingly feel content with labelling today's servicemen and women as forced into war only to become largely self-entitled upon return. As a close friend of many active service members, I would like to express my belief that the majority are not woefully “offer[ed] up” by reluctant parents, but are willing and eager to apply their extensive (and voluntary) training in the wartime setting. Additionally, as someone in my early twenties I feel confident in saying that I have experienced a far greater degree of self-entitlement, generally, in members of my peer group than I have among any variety of active or past service members.

I am not writing to offend, just simply to express my deep disappointment and to bring your attention to the fact that a number of Canadians continue to truly value Remembrance Day.

Sincerely,

Nicola

Note from Bill Casselman: I have only received 3 responses to my Remembrance Day posting, yours and two others. One post agreed with me. 2 did not. Therefore I did not "choose" to print only one that agreed with me. You and the other writer who disagreed with me make it sound like I'm stacking the deck. But I am not. ..although it may be significant that many who disagree always see the blogger as stacking the deck. Could that be a wee bit of paranoia?

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

November 07, 2011

Hello,

I scanned your piece on veterans. My initial response was that in your portrayal of your truth there lies a considerable amount of personal turmoil. No doubt your experiences have led to this and that is sadly and truly unfortunate. While there is no doubt some truth in some of what you espouse, a great many people have had another, less distressing experience; and for the most part, a history of positive experiences.

My father and uncle, now deceased, served in WWII and never presented to our families or friends in any way resembling some of the sentiments you have described. They were good people, responsible and appreciative to have the opportunity to have fulfilling and productive lives. No doubt they would have wished that these horrendous events had never taken place. And yes, young inexperienced boys may often jump where wise people would not. But the reality is that this crap happened and many died: on all fronts. Many who lived also died, somewhere inside, even though their bodies kept on living and many more were wounded by their behaviours.

This was definitely not my experience. I'm sure you know that this is the case for quite a few. I just thought I'd let you know of mine.

Thanks

Phil Rimmer, M.E.S., M.Sc.,

Executive Director,

Huntington University

Bill Casselman replies: Nevertheless, we have remembered and we have remembered enough. Enough already! Nor have we assimilated the horror, both over there, and especially here in Canada when the troops returned. Canadian art, both visual and written, has avoided the stern analysis needed. Such an analytic approach is often censored and forbidden or drowned in a sentimental sea of poppies and plastic wreaths. Some day a Canadian artist/historian will look clearly at the devastation that happened in veterans' families. I hope I'm here to read it!

BC

--------------------------------................................................
November 10, 2011

Mr Casselman

I was browsing the web to find a photo to post on my facebook page for Remembrance Day, and I noticed your distasteful article on the topic. It’s unfortunate that your family left you childhood scars which have caused you to lash out at our military.

I am a 34 year veteran, and regardless of your ranting, I will continue to honour my friends who died while on duty. I don’t know anyone who died in the great wars, but I’ll let the few remaining survivors honour their friends as well. It’s too bad that soldiers dying have inconvenienced your insignificant life in such a way.

Please feel free to sleep in on November 11^th. If you don’t come to a ceremony, will anyone care? If you don’t wear a poppy, will anyone care? If you never see a repatriation ceremony, will anyone care? If you decide to stay in Italy for the rest of your life, will anyone care? Yes you have remembered enough. You can stop now.

Jeff Baldwin

Bill Casselman replies: Jeff who?

.........................................................................................

Meet Bill Casselman Nov 5 Dunnville, Ontario

2008-11-02T10:37:00.003-05:00

Meet Bill Casselman Nov 5, 7 pm 2008

Click here for more details about the evening

http://www.riverartsfestival.ca/schedule.htm

The Optimist Hall is at 101 Main Street East,

at the corner of Main & Cedar Streets

2008-07-19T19:04:00.005-04:00

I have cleared the decks of all previous blog posts.

Thanks to all loyal readers who perused and commented on my blogs.

There will be more blogs to come. Soon.

New blogs are announced on my website,

Canadian Word of the Day.

--- Bill Casselman

Casselmanual

Fuck Third-world Children says Stephen Harper at second pro-Asbestos Rally

SmartVote: Stop playing politics with asbestos, union and health groups tell Harper

Groups make toxic mineral an election issueHealth Organizations, Unions push Harper on Asbestos Ban

GARY LUNN, the bobblehead that walks like a man

COPS NAB HUDAK-APPROVED ONTARIO TORY CANDIDATE

Harper Sucks Obama Dick Big Time

CASSELMAN IN PERSON !

NEW XMAS BOOK FOR WORD NUTS

Seeing “Evita” at Ontario’s Stratford Shakespeare Festival? Bring a vomit bag.

Go, Ignatieff, & Stand Not upon the Order of Your Going

Greedy Pharmacists Lie Like Troopers

Ontario Pharmacies: Pigs swilling at the glut trough

Stephen Harper Sells Poison Canadian Asbestos to 3rd World Children

Canada is the pond. Stephen Harper is the pond scum.

Harper & MacKay: Vile Liars about Torture

Soupy Sales: A Farewell to Larmes

Olympic Winter 2010 Medals Just Unveiled! Gosh!

Brain-Dead Tattoo Urge Explained

Roman Polanski Case: No Such Thing as a 13-Year-Old Slut

Stratford Ontario Shakespearean Actors Can't Talk

Bye-Bye to Bush: Moron and President

Casselman's 2008 Winter Reading List: Godless Filth

Passchendaele Movie Reviewed & Remembrance Day a Scam

Meet Bill Casselman Nov 5 Dunnville, Ontario

Groups make toxic mineral an election issue
Health Organizations, Unions push Harper on Asbestos Ban