Thursday, 28 May 2009

All along we thought we were South Africans

Mark has been preparing for a trip to South Africa for himself and his wife-to-be at the end of the year. Luisa's parents are from Mocambique so he and Luisa want to visit there as well. Somehow in the process of preparing for this he discovered that he lost his South African citizenship when he became a Canadian citizen. We were all under the impression that dual citizenship was automatic but we have now learnt that we had to make special application to retain our South African citizenship before becoming Canadian citizens or lose it. Sooo... since 2003 we have been Canadians, proud of our South African heritage, but not South African citizens - just Canadians with South African accents (except Judith.)  We just didn't know it.

I must say that for me, personally, I am battling to get my head and heart around this new information about my identity - or loss of part of my identity. I'm trying to understand why this is an issue for me. Nothing has changed in my personal or family history. My memories are still the same. I still have the same friends here and in South Africa. Lots of people ask me where I come from when they hear my accent, some have even told me that they love my accent, but nobody has asked if I am still a South African citizen, or a Canadian citizen for that matter. 

So what's the issue? Why do I feel like I have lost something? I have lost the right to vote in South African elections but then I have never attempted to vote from outside the country because it is my conviction that I have nothing to say if I am not prepared to live with the consequences of my vote. I have lost the right to free healthcare in RSA but then I never had free healthcare in RSA and the Canadian system is 5-star by comparison. I have lost some rights but I cannot tell you which ones that really seem to matter to me. So that doesn't seem to be the issue.

I think the feeling is more like having or not having full membership in a club.  However dubious its reputation, there is a spirit of loyalty and belonging among the paid-up members even when they argue among themselves.  They have a right to be in the club-house. Friends of club members can only be visitors. I can now only ever return to South Africa as a visitor. If the Government were so inclined they could demand visas from Canadians just as the Canadian Government requires South Africans to obtain visas for trips to Canada. That jars me - being a visitor in the country of my birth. That's like losing a hand or a foot if not an arm or a leg.

Ja, well, no, fine. My rugby team is still the Sharks even though they let me down in the last half of the Super-14 and I am now supporting the Bulls as the only SA team left and they must blerrie-well win the final. Life goes on and more is nog 'n dag and 'n boer maak 'n plan and all that. I have no regrets for the decisions I made in coming to this great country which is Canada. Maybe next season the Toronto Maple Leafs will win the Stanley Cup, or at least make the playoffs...

Tuesday, 26 May 2009

The Hell of Chemotherapy

I recommend this article to anyone who has tut-tutted over the story of Daniel Hauser, the 13-year-old with Hodgkin's lymphoma who did a bunk.

We shouldn't be judging the 'chemo kid'

The hell of treatment gives cancer survivors insight into Hauser's decision to flee

May 25, 2009

DR. RAHUL K. PARIKH
SALON.COM

The story of Daniel Hauser, a 13-year-old boy from Minnesota with Hodgkin's lymphoma, instantly grabbed international headlines last week when the boy and his mother went on the lam. Daniel's mother Colleen refuses, because of her beliefs, to authorize chemotherapy treatments for her son.

Hodgkin's lymphoma has a 90 per cent cure rate with chemotherapy, and a 95 per cent chance of killing a person without it.

Chemotherapy will likely save Daniel's life and, as a pediatrician, I would not hesitate to recommend it.

But I would also like to turn down the volume on the talk-radio chatter and outraged editorials. That's because nobody seems to be talking about what it takes to beat Hodgkin's (or any other cancer).

...For the rest of this excellent article go to The Toronto Star's parentcentral.ca

Sunday, 17 May 2009

Response to Reinier's letter re U of C wasting money

Dear Reinier,




Whether we are talking about abortion or free speech, the essential premises of the pro-life group are based on the following aphorisms:
1. human life begins with conception
2. there is a human being from the moment there is human life.

Syllogism 1 (Abortion).
Human beings have a right to life.
This foetus is a human being,
Therefore this foetus has a right to life.

Syllogism 2 (Free speech)
Human beings have a right to be heard.
All those foetuses (fetuses,foeti) about to be aborted are human beings,
Therefore all those foetuses have a right to be heard.


Obviously my presentation of the pro-life premise is heavily flavoured by my faith as a Roman Catholic but I believe that this, purely and simply, is the crux of the great divide. If pro-choicers are basing their conclusions on premises contradictory to these then all discussion on the conclusions will sound like a discussion with the Mad Hatter.

It seems to me that people are spending too much time debating, arguing, fighting, whatever, over conclusions to syllogisms based on different or contradictory premises instead of discussing the differences between the critical premise. (For readers who don't know, a syllogism is a conclusion based on two propositions called premises, e.g.: all dogs are mammals; Lassie is a dog; therefore Lassie is a mammal.)

Before going on further down this road I would like to get your response to the above. Also, I have presented you with what I believe to be, at least the Catholic cohort's version of, the essential premise of the pro-life movement. I would be curious to know how you would state the essential axioms and premise(s) of pro-choicers.

Best regards
Terry

Tuesday, 12 May 2009

Take it like a man, ladies

The following article is taken from yesterday's edition of The Toronto Star.

No girl power in shaming cheats

May 11, 2009 08:50 AM

Rosie DiManno

Advice to cuckolded women: Man up a bit.

(Yes, cuckold is technically a term applied to husbands of unfaithful wives. But there's no reverse equivalent that I can find in the dictionary. Suggestions welcome.)

Two such high profile missuses have been in the news lately – Elizabeth Edwards, a.k.a. St. Elizabeth, and Veronica Lario Berlusconi, née Miriam Barolini.

Both have been profoundly wronged, certainly to hear them tell, which each is doing via the vehicle of biography and TV confessional, for one, and ambushing emails to the media, for the other.

Say what you will about husbands who are cads – as their respective spouses, disgraced Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi – appear to be. Yet males, even those who have been on the violated end of infidelity, are rarely wont to open a vein in public.

There are exceptions to this generalization, of course. But for the most part, men do not go whingeing to Oprah or pen avenging memoirs that simultaneously mortify a couple's children or wash the dirty BVDs out in the open.

I suspect this comes from the social conditioning of boys, who are still raised to not shed tears in public or otherwise reveal themselves as pussies. Girls, by comparison, are nurtured in the culture of tattle and tell-all grievance from the time they're subjected to their first schoolyard name-calling.

Females are inundated with mass media messaging – subliminal and overt – about bred-in-the-genes persecution, the biological and manifest destiny of their X chromosome, the gender for whom offence is endlessly done to.

The consequence, too often, is a kind of emotional indigestion with public burping as the antacid, especially for women who can command an audience.

They seek public validation for their pain.

Elizabeth Edwards has always seemed a smart, tough lady who might have been a fine public servant on her own merits had she not subsumed herself in the advancement of hubby's career. There have been dreadful tragedies in her life, from the loss of a teenage son in an automobile accident to a recurrence of cancer, untreatable.

But of one thing she remained assured: That devoted husband would not betray her, sexually.

As everyone now knows, John-Boy Edwards was a two-timing cheat who may have fathered a child with a woman who had been making campaign videos for him in 2006. Before the world found out, Edwards admitted the "indiscretion" to his wife, at which point she screamed, sobbed and threw up. He said it was only that one-night-stand time, a lie.

Elizabeth Edwards has recounted all this, wincingly, in her just released book, Resilience, and appeared on Oprah last week to discuss same – the only proviso that the name of The Other Woman never be mentioned during the interview.

The purpose of dragging her hurt into the limelight escapes me. Quite apart from further embarrassing the father of her children, she also makes herself pathetic and sound like a fool; can't understand the why of his unfaithfulness. But the why of adultery is never that complicated: Attraction, availability, boredom, horniness, because it's there.

Instead, beyond a vague reference to her husband's "narcissism," Elizabeth Edwards puts the blame on a woman she portrays as a bimbo and whose baby she describes as "it."

"It didn't occur to me that at a fancy hotel in New York, where he sat with a potential donor to his antipoverty work, he would be targeted by a woman who would confirm that the man at the table was John Edwards and then would wait for him outside the hotel hours later when he returned from a dinner, wait with the come-on line "You are so hot" ... And if you had asked me to wager that house we were building on whether my husband of then 28 years would have responded to a come-on like that, I would have said no."

Shows how little she knows about men in general and her husband in particular. What planet is this trained lawyer living on? Must be the one where bitter women wield their anguish for vindication and town square shaming.

There's nothing dignified or girl power-ing about it.

Meanwhile, back at the palazzo ...

That would be the suburban Milan mansion where Veronica Lario has been living, apart from her vulgarian husband, for several years. This marriage has been over for ages and Lario has maintained a mostly low-wattage existence, except for the occasions when she wasn't – by unburdening her ample chest on the public zeitgeist.

Long-suffering is how Lario is usually described.

That's manipulative, the conventional take on a wife who chose to stay wedlocked to her perma-tanned husband despite his chronically cheesy behaviour, from phone calls to a sex chat line (purportedly for the purpose of opinion polling, a typical Berlusconi stunt) to old-coot flirting with curvaceous TV starlets (some of whom he put forward as candidates in the upcoming European parliamentary elections) to verbal (at minimum) groping of women who usually sex-wagged right back.

Two years ago, Lario – by newspaper correspondence – demanded a public apology from her boulevardier husband for telling a former Miss Italy contestant (now minister of equal opportunities in Berlusconi's cabinet): "If I weren't married I would marry you immediately." Of his many gaffes, that one seems fairly harmless, actually.

But a baroque mea culpa was issued forthwith, published in the many Italian newspapers Berlusconi owns: "I beg you to forgive me."

More recent provocations – especially Berlusconi's attendance at the 18th birthday of a Napolitano nymphet who calls him "Papi," when he allegedly has been a no-show for his own kids' 18th birthday celebrations – had Lario blasting away again in late-night emails to two news agencies. "I cannot stay with a man who frequents minors," she sniffed, while dismissing those bimbette election candidates as "shameless rubbish to entertain the emperor."

Cue the divorce lawyers and upcoming war over the 72-year-old billionaire's fortune.

It's hard to view Lario, 52, and gorgeous if cosmetically enhanced, as the fregato victim.

The couple met almost 30 years ago when she was performing topless in a play at the theatre Berlusconi owned. While still married to his first wife, Lario bore him a son, then two more children before they wed.

No doubt the first Mrs. Berlusconi thought her usurper was a home-wrecking seductress too.

You reap what you sow. Sometimes you weep over husbands spreading their seed elsewhere.

But public parading of intimate betrayal – by book or by online crook – is tawdry payback.

Stay or go. Just take it like a man, ladies.

Saturday, 9 May 2009

A river flows through it - our very own

Today we had 50 mm (2 inches) of rain in just a few hours. The result was a river of stormwater through our backyard.


Here are some pictures of our very own river starting from our neighbours' property and going out at the bottom of our yard. The dark thing in the middle of the third picture is our fire pit.