I think that Pico Iyer is an excellent writer. One of his favourite topics is observing things as an outsider because of travelling and living in various countries.


"It's the birthday of novelist and travel writer Pico Iyer, born to Indian parents in Oxford, England (1957). He went to graduate school at Harvard, and during the summers he got a job writing for a budget travel guidebook. He got a job working for Time magazine. His first book, Video Nights in Katmandu, came out in 1988.

Pico Iyer said, 'The less conscious one is of being 'a writer,' the better the writing. And though reading is the best school of writing, school is the worst place for reading. Writing should ... be as spontaneous and urgent as a letter to a lover, or a message to a friend who has just lost a parent ... and writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.' "

(from "The Writer's Almanac" on National Public Radio in the U.S.)

Here's more evidence that Stephen Harper is wasting no time in establishing himself as a bad Prime Minister.


New parliamentary secretary to Francophonie can't speak French
Last Updated Fri, 10 Feb 2006 07:30:15 EST
CBC News

Francophone groups and opposition MPs are raising concerns about an appointment in Stephen Harper's government after learning the parliametary secretary for la Francophonie doesn't speak French.

INDEPTH: The Conservative cabinet

Alberta MP Ted Menzies was sworn in on Monday as parliamentary secretary to la Francophonie and Official Languages Minister Josee Verner. He was also made parliamentary secretary to the minister of international co-operation.

Minority French groups like the New Brunswick Acadian Society say nominating a unilingual anglophone to this position shows just how hard it is to communicate with the Harper government.

New Democrat MP Yvon Godin, an Acadian, says it's proof Prime Minister Harper didn't think these nominations through.

"It's like telling the anglophones, we're going to give someone to represent you. And he only speaks French and he doesn't speak English at all and that's your representative and you deal with it," said Godin.

But Menzies, who has taken a French immersion course and says he plans to continue learning, brushed off the criticisms.

"We have two official languages in this country. Not just French. Not just English. We have two official languages," said Menzies.

Who better to represent Canada's two official languages than a minister from Quebec for the French and a parliamentary secretary for the English, he said.

It's the latest in a stream of criticism Harper has faced over his cabinet appointments.

New International Trade Minister David Emerson crossed the floor from the Liberals two weeks after the federal election, angering many in his his Vancouver riding who say they voted in a Liberal. His riding association has asked for him to return $97,000 in donations, and even some Conservative MPs have said Emerson should resign and run in a byelection as a Tory.
Harper has also taken heat for appointing unelected party operative Michael Fortier as public works minister and to the Senate.

Martina Navratilova, speaking about her tennis career at age 50, said, "It's maybe about defying age and showing Father Time, 'Hey, I'm still here.' "

Nepal, which I visited in 1987, is a beautiful country with a horrible political situation. Here's more evidence of the latter aspect.


Violence, low turnout mar Nepalese elections
Last Updated Wed, 08 Feb 2006 15:05:07 EST
CBC News

Violence resulting in the death of at least six people and low voter turnout have marred the first elections in Nepal in seven years.

One person was shot by soldiers during a protest on Wednesday. The government had warned that the army would target anyone who tried to interfere with the voting.

According to preliminary results, just more than 20 per cent of voters had cast ballots, chief election commissioner Keshav Raj Rajbhandari said.

Final figures were scheduled to be released Thursday.

FROM JAN. 26, 2006: Anti-monarchy strike disrupts Nepal

Major political parties have criticized the election, refusing to take part because they claim it is a sham aimed at perpetuating King Gyanendra's control of the country.

The king sacked the elected government a year ago and seized power.

Voting was taking place in only 36 towns and cities because the country's remaining 22 municipalities lacked candidates or had contenders running unopposed.

The army said soldiers were "compelled to open fire" on some 150 protesters trying to interfere with voting in the southwestern town of Dang. One person was killed and one was wounded, the military said.

Two rebels were killed when Maoist insurgents bombed at least 12 government buildings and destroyed the local bank, the Defence Ministry said.

The insurgents also killed a policeman and civilian, and took seven government officials and three policemen hostage during the assault in Dhankuta, according to reports.

Another rebel was killed in a clash with soldiers in the western town of Dhangadi, the ministry said in a statement.

On Tuesday, three rebels had been killed in violence linked to the elections.

Gyanendra's government has rounded up hundreds of politicians, activists and journalists in the last several weeks in the wake of threats to disrupt the vote.

On Wednesday morning, police arrested about 30 politicians and activists who were trying to organize protests in an eastern border town.

George W. Bush was unnerved when someone asked him at a press conference if he'd seen the movie "Brokeback Mountain". Here's a link to a video of Bush's unintentionally humourous response: http://www.shostako.com/bush_clip.wmv .

"It's the birthday of the novelist Kate Chopin, born Katherine O'Flaherty in St. Louis, Missouri (1851). She married a wealthy owner of a cotton business and lived with him in New Orleans. But after her husband suddenly died of a fever, a rumor got out that she'd been having an affair with a married neighbor. The town turned against her and she eventually moved back to St. Louis to live with her mother.

It was there that Chopin first began to write. She had six children to take care of, so she wrote on a lapboard in the living room while her children played around her. Because she was so busy, she tried to write as quickly as she could. In less than ten years she produced three novels and more than a hundred short stories.

Chopin's early work was melodramatic and sentimental, but everything changed when she first read the French writer Guy de Maupassant. She wrote, "Here was a man who had escaped from tradition and authority, who had entered into himself and looked out upon life through his own being and with his own eyes ... [who wrote] without the plots, the old fashioned mechanism and stage trapping that in a vague, unthinking way I had fancied were essential to the art of story making."

Chopin began to write more explicitly about dissatisfied wives and marital infidelity. Then she published The Awakening (1899) about a woman who leaves her husband and her children to have an affair and become an artist and then eventually commits suicide by swimming out to sea. It was one of the first novels ever written by a woman about a woman committing adultery and it was almost universally attacked by critics. The St. Louis literary community refused to review the novel at all and libraries and bookstores in Chopin's hometown wouldn't stock the book. Chopin was unable to publish her next book of short stories and she died five years later, in 1904.

Today, The Awakening is considered one of greatest novels of 19th-century American literature. "

(from Garrison Keillor's "The Writer's Almanac" on National Public Radio in the U.S.)

Today I got three CDs in the mail that I had ordered from amazon.ca. They're all by The Decemberists, a wonderful young, independent-label, American band that I had heard some songs by on the Internet. It's difficult to describe their music. It includes folk, rock, pop and macabre English sea shanties. Here's their website: www.decemberists.com .

Fred Phelps Confronted
Special to 365Gay.com
by Jeff Golimowski, KAKE TV
Saturday, February 04, 2006 12:31 AM

(Topeka, Kansas)

When we went to talk with Rev. Fred Phelps we thought we were prepared for anything, but even we were shocked about what we saw and heard.

"God hates America," said Phelps. He offers no apologies.

"This country is hellbound, it's hopeless," said Phelps.

We went with Phelps and his flock to protest in front of a Catholic church and to his sermon because we wanted to find out what it is that makes him spread his message that so many call hate.

Phelps' church isn't a big place. About 60 people were there the Sunday we visited, 30 of them children.

His sermon often rambles, he repeats himself, jumps from one topic to the next and is often tough to follow. He includes conspiracy theories and a lot of fire and brimstone.

Phelps believes in the doctrine of predestination. He says God has selected a small number of humans to go to heaven, the rest are out of luck.

"The doctrine of absolute predestination is the bible from one end to the other," said Phelps.

He says he protests to help people repent and America is doomed if it doesn't heed his message. A first step for the national repentance? He says it is criminalizing sodomy.

"And you have to attach the penalty of death to it," said Phelps.

"So then kill all homosexuals?," we asked.

"You can't make that leap," said Phelps. "When you pass a law that doesn't mean that everybody is going to break it, but those that do break it ought to be executed."

We forced the issue, does he believe homosexuals should die?

"You insist on putting it that way but I'm telling you just because you pass a law you don't assume everyone is going to break it, but that prohibition must be there if this county expects to get any favors from God," said Phelps.

Phelps views himself as an instrument of God's will, but what drives him to be so outlandish, so hateful?

"Those old Baptist preachers delivered me a charge from Isaiah 58:1," said Phelps. "Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet and show thy people their transgressions."

He and his followers certainly lift up their voices attacking those who go to churches Phelps disagrees with, which include almost all of them. Even those considered very conservative, such as the Wichita church ran by anti-gay marriage activist Terry Fox.

"That jackass down there, Fox in Wichita, his church is just chock full of divorced and remarried people," said Phelps. "He has no moral authority to preach about homosexuals."
Phelps says America's acceptance of homosexuality is responsible for the nation's problems.
"Homosexuality is not an innocent alternate lifestyle, it's not a civil right," said Phelps. "It's a monstrous sin against God almighty."

He protests soldiers' funerals because he says their deaths are evidence of God's vengeance.
"Dying time is truth time," said Phelps. "That would seem to us to be God's forum of choice."
We asked Phelps, "Do you preach hate?"

"Not in the pejorative sense I don't," said Phelps. "The truth of the matter is I'm the only one who loves these fags."

Phelps believes by pointing out what he calls the sin of homosexuality, he's fulfilling the Bible's commandment to love thy neighbor, but not letting his sin go unrebuked.
"These kissypoo preachers that are telling them they are all right like they are, they don't love them, they hate them," said Phelps.

He lives in a world familiar to 18th century preachers where hell is real and close by. Where God is often angry and vengeful. He's not sure if he will be going to heaven, but he's pretty sure about members of the media. He often sends us press releases full of slurs and bible verses and calls us on his website fag enablers.

And he says the more hatred he generates toward himself, the happier he will be.
" I seek out ways to speak the truth of god," said Phelps.

By the way, Fred Phelps says on his website he doesn't pray for those he believes damned. But he told us as we left we were on his list of people he was fond of because he has had the opportunity to preach to us.


Jeff Golimowski is the chief investigative reporter for KAKE-TV in Wichita, Kansas
© 365Gay.com 2006