Bwahahahaha. The snow's up to our roofs, it's colder in Winnipeg than on Mars, and the mayor thinks that clearing the snow and ice off city streets is an unnecessary luxury. Sometimes you really need a laugh. The Globe and Mail came to the rescue Saturday. In a puff piece about the over-budget, overdue, over-hyped Canadian Museum for Human Rights, writer Roy MacGregor gushed that "(m)ore than 75,000 people" have donated money to build the thing. "It is a striking and memorable building, if rather eccentric." Which is Toronto-high society-speak for "Yikes, is it ever ugly!" http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/in-winnipeg-a-striking-museum-for-an-evolving-city/article16193962/ The punchline of the piece is how wrong MacGregor's awe-inducing declaration of public support for the epic money pit is. By all accounts, the real number of donors to the CMHR is barely 7500. That's right, one-tenth of wh...
The origin of the Usher of the Black Rod goes back to early fourteenth century England . Today, with no royal duties to perform, the Usher knocks on the doors of the House of Commons with the Black Rod at the start of Parliament to summon the members. The rod is a symbol for the authority of debate in the upper house. We of The Black Rod adopted the symbol to knock some sense and the right questions into the heads of Legislators, pundits, and other opinion makers.