Yes, three weeks or so is rather a long time to not update, I agree. Thanks for Aliza for kicking my ass into gear and letting me know that 25% of my readership has a bone to pick with me.
Hey, when you've only got 4 readers and you know them all by name, criticism takes on a new and very personal form.
So, on an unrelated note, the thin veneer of family-friendliness of the strip gets another nasty shock as we start off a new story arc and introduce some new characters. Stick around and you'll soon see what I mean. I'm sorry to anyone who tunes in at a later date somehow thinking I might have been able to maintain a G rating for this strip, it's just not in my nature.
Candidly, I'm not entirely sure what's in my nature, but that's a question best answered by proxy, i.e. ask my friends (I'm almost positively certain that no good can come of this and yet I point you in that direction anyway).
This weekend has included some spectacularly memorable highlights, of which only a few, to white:
- getting sickeninly little sleep on Friday due to my 2 year-old sweetheart of a daughter getting a nasty gastro.
- steam cleaning the carpet three times this weekend (with a fourth one tomorrow due to said gastro)
- dressing up in a Tom Baker-era Doctor Who getup (complete with nerdy self-knitted-when-I-was-sixteen-Tom-Baker-Scarf and dry humping a Dalek Pinata screaming "take it like a pepperpopt, you bitch" and "Shove off, Eccleston, I've been waiting since 1976 for this"
- birthday pints with my Brit-mate Ella, who's possibly the only person in the world who gets all my oblique references to Goon Show episodes and is the only person I know (other than my lovely wife) who's heard of either Frankie Howerd -or- the "Carry On" gang.
Finally, a little teeny rant: I'm no fan of constitutional law, but I think my professor in the course is trying to convince me that the Supreme Court is nothing but a pack of self-serving politically motivated power-mongers who can do whatever they want pretty much whenever they way.
If you think about it a bit, you'll have to agree that the concept isn't as far fetched as all that. They are, after all, the ultimate court of appeal in Canada. So, if the federals and the provincials can't agree to something, they send it up to the Supreme Court, and that lot cuts the difference one way or another and makes the decision, even if the decision means creating a new constitutional set of rules.
See, technically, we're supposed to have a neat little system to deal with changes to the constitution, and that's called Section V of the 1982 Constutional Act. But on a heandful of occasions since 1982, and a bunch before that the S.C. has flexed its juridicial muscles on things that really weren't any of their business. And the real kicker is that most of the meddling was justified on some reallllly thin ice. Their strongest arguments were based on the "unwritten principles" contained in the preamble to our constitution (which by the by has no legitimate legal force in the strict sense), and their fallback position for justifying and of their actions is that the preamble refers to the fact that we wanted a constitution that was "similar in nature to the constitution of Great Britain" (or words to that effect).
For those not in that know: the constitution of Great Britain is largely not written down, so you can use that convenient piece of text to pretty much say whatever you want it to say if you slant it right.
ASIDE: Oh yeah, the 1982 document is the same document that talks out of one mouth and espouses "freedom of conscience and religion" (part 1, article 2a...which includes the right to NOT have a religion) and out of the other claims that this "recognizes the supremacy of God" (part I, preamble). END ASIDE.
And the worst part is that this Supreme Court of ours is supposed to answer questions put to it, and only those questions put to it. Thing is, sometimes they decide to interpret the question in a certain way, lengthily explain why they want to interpret it in a way that isn't letter-for-letter the question they received, and sometimes they'll go further and (as a 23 page aside) answer a completely different question as well which doesn't have a specific bearing on the original question but they feel needs clarifying. The scary thing is that their interpretationg on questions that weren't put to them will go on the record, and it's pretty much taken as gospel that no other court in Canada will go against that opinion once it has been put down on paper, even if it wasn't part of what was being asked.
I swear, if 5 out of those 9 judges so much as fart simultaneously, the entire country will swing away from the stink in a display of mindless synchronization.
It's a scary case of "who watches the watchmen?", but what do you do when you disagree with the way the supreme court of appeal is run? To whom do you appeal? It's one of those mind-bogglingly simple things to ask that doesn't have an easy answer.
Oh, and just in case you thought that the system was in any vague way, shape, or form fair... at any point in time 3 of those 9 judges are from Quebec, and that's been written into the Constitution as well. Ten provinces, three territories, 9 judges, and three of them are from Quebec.
That means that it only take two non-Quebec-but-still-simultaneous farts to swing the country down that mindlessly stinky path.
I dunno, between that, the language compromise, and the whole Quebec secession thing, I'm really starting to get peeved by Constitutional Law. I'm starting to think that this isn't law at all, just politics and compromise. There's no rightness, justness or fairness in any of this, just self-serving self-interested politicking.
And we haven't even started studying the Mulroney years... it's going to be a fun-fun-fun year, boyz and girlz...
