One thing that is always brought back to me when I get to live with my parents for a while is how much I love reading a decent daily newspaper. The Globe and Mail is no Guardian, but it is, at least, a fairly reliable and intelligently written (save Leah McLaren (fluffhead, but not even endearingly so) and Margaret Wente (deranged)) publication. I've been reading it online while in LA, but the online version doesn't have all the comment and random tidbit stories, as well, the online version doesn't spread out all over my kitchen table quite so well.

I don't know whether I am more or less happy at having the daily paper in the wake of the tsunamis in the Indian Ocean, however. Participating in this event as a weepy-faced newsprint fiend leaves me feeling like yet another victim/perpetrator of our strange modern mediated kind of life.

On a somewhat related note, the Canadian government is matching donations by Canadians dollar for dollar. The kind of cash that's been pouring in from around the world is going to make the difference between a lot of people getting drowned and a whole lot of people dying from disease. Hey, more people died in the flu of 1918 than in the four years of war that lead up to it.

My dad and I were looking at the stats of people killed in natural disasters. The highest recorded number was over 3 million in a landslide in China in 1931. What was shocking was that this number doesn't come close to some of the massacres that we humans have practised on ourselves.

On a completely unrelated note:
I was in the Sally Ann looking for tapes for the car when I came across a cassette that warped my tender mind. The tape was called "I Hope You Find Jesus This Christmas" and the cover art was a photo of a plastic doll (with a clearly visible neck joint) swaddled in a yellow blanket with a empty cigarette pack, open, lying across its lap. Superimposed over this is a 1980s happy, reverant kind of man with a shag, looking down at the Christ child... or the empty pack of smokes, it's hard to tell. Anyway, pretty unbelievable, in all senses of the word. Didn't buy it; went home with Billy Joel's "An Innocent Man" instead.