Brushing aside Nietzsche's excellent warning that reading first thing in the morning is vicious, I cast my breakfast eye on the Boxing Day edition of the Edmonton Journal, fresh out of the mailbox. Lots of flyers, of course, to keep the capitalist materialism clattering smartly along (Sobey's Liquor lures me with $4 off Muskoka Brewery's "Survival Pack"--a 12-box picturing a quaint gent in a Boer War-era hat holding four bottles of their product. The Maple Leaf Forev-urp!!)
The big story atop page-one is "Wolverine stronghold beckons researchers." Actually, considering what the oil industry is doing in Alberta, "weakhold" would be a better word. But you know how it is with journalists, journalese and rousing headlines.
It also occurs to me that in putting GPS trackers on wolverines, our researchers are committing a rather grotesque violation of the creatures' privacy. Really, it's none of the scientists' damn business what the wolverines do and where they go, right?
Simultaneously however, it occurs to me that it would have been (and still may be) an excellent idea to place such a tracker on Bob Dylan back in, say, 1962, with a little nano-cam at eye-level to tell us what the unrepentant bookworm is reading. Something tells me that in 1966-67 we would have seen a lot of Signet editions of Shakespeare, and overall we would suffer much less random blather from music critics and other Dylanologists.
As to the rest of the paper, from Legislature-dome repairs to the Canadian news-story of the year (Lac Megantic inferno trumps Rob Ford's druggie adventures) let me just abscond Don Henley's summary: "Looked at the headlines/ Put me in a real bad mood." Yep.
Toss it aside and get to work already.
