There was a forum for the candidates for the NDP leadership tonight at a local restaurant so I headed over to check it out. Here are some random impressions…– I arrived early and bumped into a young woman who looked really familiar but who I couldn't place. She did the “you look familiar…” routine with […]
My classmate, Lauralee, who has a history of drawing great stick figure art recently outdid herself with the FTRW poster she made for her library. Very cool! (I'm embarrassed to say I just realised that I don't even know if RPL had any FTRW events. I did suggest it to a person who works in […]
So, on somewhat short notice, Shea and I have decided to head for Sin City (except that we'll have Pace in tow so “sin” will be restricted to too much sugar and staying up later than 8pm.) How this came about is that my parents called last weekend that they'd won a free flight to […]
I've mentioned one of the all-time most popular Ask Metafilter threads on this blog before – “What childhood experience most shaped who you are today?” It's a a great one that I go back to with some regularity, and especially now that I have a child of my own. A few months back, I was […]
I started the week talking about a discussion the librarians at RPL were having about the issue of patrons viewing pornography on the public access computers. Although this is an important philosophical discussion, I'm happy to report that (at least as far as I know), patrons' viewing isn't being monitored or censored and no policy […]
Reddit recently had a question posted asking their community to submit the most offensive joke(s) they knew. There's some pretty disturbing material here and if you doubt the power of the written word to affect people just as much as the visuals of pornography or the sound of foul language, look no further than this […]
A great documentary I'd highly recommend…
Here's an article about FTRW that appeared in Xtra.ca (“Where Queers Conspire”). They asked various Canadian literary types and free speech proponents to give their thoughts on some common and/or recently challenged books. From the article's introduction:Canada is a censorious country. Our nanny state bans most hate speech (not the religious-based homophobic kind), stops erotica […]
What's FTRW without a couple stories about Peggy Atwood… Her books are currently being challenged in a Toronto school by a parent who says: “…if students repeated some of the words from Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale in the school halls, they'd be suspended, so he questions why it is okay in the classroom.” But […]
This was a popular song when I was in undergrad around the time that Nobel Peace Prize winner, Al Gore's wife, Tipper was contributing to greenhouse gases by shooting off a lot of hot air about obscene lyrics in popular music. Thanks to Wikipedia, I now know that Anthrax released two versions of their album […]
