The Benefits Of A Cult Following

"The disciples turned over their possessions to him in exchange for the privilege of being subjected to prolonged forced labor in conditions that may have been deliberately intended to hasten the members' death."
- Philip Jenkins on Edward Arthur Wilson of the Aquarian Foundation in Mystics & Messiahs: Cults and New Religions in American History

GREATEST ALBUM TITLE/BAND NAME TANDEM OF ALL TIME

Ruins: The Complete Works of God and the State by God and the State

Rhyming Couplet Of The Day

Are you the answer to a drunken sailor’s lonely wish?
Or are you an optical illusion caused by a woman sitting on a rock
Holding half a fish?
- Mermaids, Flight Of The Conchords

Scratch Marks The Itch

Alternate Names For Canada

Alaska East
Anglo-French Empire
British North America
Canzania
Coldasia
The Dominion
Francobritannia
Frozen-Over District
Greater Britain
Greater Ontario
Hudsonia
Igloostan
Indo-China North
Indoeurasia
Kanadia
Lesser Britain
Molsonia
Multikultistan
North America North
North America's Better Half
Northern Empire
Northern Wastelands
Northstralia
Nova Siberia
Trudeaupia
Tundrastan

Hero Of The Day

"I also recall during the Khomeini revolution substituing vodka for red wine in restaurants so that revolutionary guards looking in believed we were drinking water. A wealthy Azerbaijani friend in Shemiran hired a mechanical digger at that time to bury enough whisky and vodka in his garden to last for the rest of his life (I don't know whether he is still alive!)."

- William Dunn, Comment on "Wines in the Koran" article

Another Piss In The Wind

I don't know how useful my writings can be here anymore. I feel I'm pissing in the wind. This blog has been a great outlet for my mental health, particularly as a focus for my obsessive-compulsiveness. But reality is catching up. Before I know it I'll be what I already am, but older and with no more excuses. I keep reading and reading and writing and writing in preparation for... for... Ptah! For the sake of having my own little corner of existence so I can grin and bear the rest. But the truth is I know it's a farce. Sometimes I feel I'd be better off with a lobotomy. The plan has been to meet my own invisible standards of progress as a person, but the problem with invisible standards is they lead to invisible results. I'm trying to exist outside of time but I can't avoid the reality of the clock. I have to fight the urge to make blanket statements that may be true but get me nowhere, like: my generation is shit. Their values are shit, their music is shit, their future is you get the point. I like the history of movements, because they remind me of a time when things actually moved. There is no spark anymore. There is no cause worth latching on to. Ideologies are dead, religions are undead, nationalism is a carcass. Art no longer aspires to be the world, change the world, because it's been tried and found wanting. I learn and read and I know revolutions never accomplish anything in the long-term. But oh the short-term. People in the West once had things worth dying for. And anemic Islamist necro-theology is no answer, it's just the death spasms of a civilization headed for our direction. The despair is that there is no ready-made answer anymore. There's no place for someone like me to fall into. I just have to adjust and crawl into my hole. The world belongs to the young, feminized and stupid and at least I still have one of the three. It's been determined that I'm the only one in the world who feels this way. I need to find a happiness teat to suck on. It's no good being a dashed utopian in a dashed utopia. I rely on music and books. I wish there was more.

The Great Ontario Trivia Challenge: Dare You Accept!?

In 1913, French-Canadian leader Henri Bourassa denounced the government of Ontario as "more Prussian than Prussia" during the Ontario Schools Question crisis, after Ontario restricted the use of French in their schools and made English the official language of instruction.

In 1993 Garry Hoy, a Toronto lawyer, fell to his death after he threw himself through the glass wall on the 24th floor of the Toronto-Dominion Centre in order to prove the glass was "unbreakable."

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Armenians who had escaped persecution from the Armenian Genocide formed communities in southern Ontario. However, Armenian immigration was limited; since the Canadian government had classified Armenians as Asiatic, they were considered alien and undesirable guests.

At WrestleMania X8 in Toronto, the Rock took on "Hollywood" Hulk Hogan in what has been called one of the most memorable matches of all time. Toronto fans audibly cheered for Hogan, who was the heel, after every move (including heelish moves like "the back rake of doom").

Canada's Tamil population is thought to constitute the largest Sri Lankan diaspora in the world and Toronto is the city with the largest number of Sri Lankan Tamils in the world. Gas mascot Tony the Tiger is reportedly inspired by the Tamil Tigers.

Today, the communities of Thunder Bay and Sudbury form the main centres of Finnish-Canadian activity. Thunder Bay boasts the largest Finnish population outside of Scandinavia, and the only Finnish cultural centre in Canada housed in the Finnish Labour Temple along with the Hoito Restaurant.

Paris, Ontario is referred to not only as "the cobblestone capital of Canada" (in reference to a number of aged cobblestone houses) but also as "the prettiest town in Canada".

Dr. Henry Norman Bethune, a rabid communist who served in the Chinese Civil War and was praised by Mao, was born in Gravenhurst, Ontario. He is one of the few Westerners to have a statue in Communist China, and also has a hospital and a medical school named in his honour. According to Mao: We must all learn the spirit of absolute selflessness from him. With this spirit everyone can be very helpful to each other. A man's ability may be great or small, but if he has this spirit, he is already noble-minded and pure, a man of moral integrity and above vulgar interests, a man who is of value to the people.

Ontario has the largest economy in Canada. Nominal Gross Domestic Product in 2003 was an estimated C$494.229 billion (40.6% of the Canadian total), larger than the GDP of Austria, Belgium or Sweden.

In 1916, Berlin, Ontario changed its name to Kitchener; after Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener. The town of Kaiser Wilhelm, Ontario, remained surprisingly unchanged.

In 1866 a group of around a thousand angry Irish-Americans known as the Fenian Brotherhood briefly captured Fort Erie, Ontario. Their goal, to seize Canada and return it in exchange for the independence of Ireland, was foiled when US authorities interrupted their supply lines and arrested their reinforcements. A famous Fenian soldier's song goes: We are the Fenian Brotherhood, skilled in the arts of war, And we're going to fight for Ireland, the land we adore, Many battles we have won, along with the boys in blue, And we'll go and capture Canada, for we've nothing else to do.

Hamilton, Ontario was the host of the first Commonwealth Games, then called British Empire Games in 1930.

During World War II, the provincial government sought to change the town of Swastika, Ontario's name to Winston, in honour of Winston Churchill, but the town refused, insisting that the town had held the name long before the Nazis co-opted the symbol. Residents of Swastika used to tell the story of how the Ontario Department of Highways would erect new signs on the roads at the edge of the town. At night the residents would tear these signs down and put up their own signs proclaiming the town to be "Swastika".

The British aristocratic Mitford family owned the Swastika Mine for which Swastika, Ontario was named. Nazi sympathizer Unity Mitford claimed to have been conceived there.

Former Latvian President Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga was a student at the University of Toronto.

Far-right Catholic demagogue Charles Coughlin, whose pro-Hitler sermons reached a radio audience of over forty million during the American Depression, was born in Hamilton, Ontario. He remains surprisingly uncelebrated in his hometown.

Zombie Revolutionary

Che instructed his Revolutionary Tribunals: "We don't need proof to execute a man. We only need proof that it's necessary to execute him. A revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate."

Shortly afterwards, Che's father in Buenos Aires received a letter from his prodigal son. "I'd like to confess, papa, at that moment I discovered that I really like killing."

"If the nuclear missiles had remained, we would have used them against the very heart of America, including New York City," Che Guevara confided to the London Daily Worker in November 1962. "We will march the path of victory even if it costs millions of atomic victims. ... We must keep our hatred alive and fan it to paroxysm."

In the halcyon post-revolution days, Che was made Governor of the National Bank, his face appearing on the two peso note. Magnum photographer Rene Burri - he took another defining photograph of Che, eyes blazing, cigar clamped in the side of his mouth - tells this story about the haphazard creation of Castro's first cabinet. 'One of Castro's aides asked, "Is there an economist in the room?", and, to everyone's surprise, Che stuck up his hand. Because they were all in awe of him, they voted him governor of the bank. It turns out Che had misheard the question. He thought the guy had asked, "Is there a Communist in the room?"'

'There is a sense, seldom articulated, that Che, for all his heroism and romance, was a wild card, and that even Castro realised this relatively early on,' says Lawrence Osborne. 'He had this Jack London-style attitude to revolution as one great big unending adventure, but none of the political maturity to deal with the practical realities of making the country work. He had this Castilian Spanish upper-class guilt about the working class and peasants that he never quite overcame. For all the noble impulses that drove him, and I think there were many, Che's whole life could be read as a foredoomed attempt to leave his own class.'

In his "Bolivian Diary," Guevara laments not recruiting a single peasant to his army. Some peasants thought that Guevara and his men — whose months in the jungle had left them with unkempt beards and tattered clothes — were wizards.

“If in doubt, kill him” were Che’s instructions.

Unfortunately, Cuba had no raw materials for heavy industry, and, as a consequence of the revolutionary redistribution, it had no hard currency with which to buy them—or even basic goods. By 1961, Guevara was having to give embarrassing explanations to the workers at the office: “Our technical comrades at the companies have made a toothpaste ... which is as good as the previous one; it cleans just the same, though after a while it turns to stone.” By 1963, all hopes of industrializing Cuba were abandoned, and the revolution accepted its role as a colonial provider of sugar to the Soviet bloc in exchange for oil to cover its needs and to re-sell to other countries.

In 1965 Ginsberg was deported from Cuba for publicly protesting against Cuba's anti-marijuana stance and its penchant for throwing homosexuals in jail, but also for an alleged remark referring to revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara as "cute."

The Observer: Just a pretty face?
Che Guevara: 39 Years of Hype
The Killing Machine: Che Guevara, from Communist Firebrand to Capitalist Brand
Following in Che's Footsteps
Unofficial Biography

Rhyming Couplet Of The Day

Of Grandfatherly gentleness I'm devoid,
there's not a single grey hair in my soul!
- Vladimir Mayakovsky