Every now and again I get an outraged e-mail on the topic of this piece of world-weary juvenilia, which appeared in a long-defunct attempt at a humour magazine called The Grandstand. The best ever response, from somone called jane jay, arrived today:

hi just read your blog

as the title suggests i have read your blog you seem to have an unhealthy view of my home city Sheffield UK if you dont remember one thing you got right was the fact that naseem hamed is a dick head the rest seems to be the ravings of an uneducated yank this is not your fault as most of your fellow countrymen seem to know absolutly loads about nothing, and nothing about loads, your education system teaches you to butcher the english language (was colour too hard to spell with the u) 260 million people in the usa and you elect a former drunk who before he came to be president had only left the united states 2 both on junkets with his father then the president. instead of someone who actually know what the terrors of war are.

if indeed you are a yank then look at your own country, a country that when hurricane katrina hit used the military to gaurd white people’s homes that wern’t flooded instead of saving black people who were drowning

i’ll leave you with this thought

when noah was on the ark on the 40th day the animal shit was piling up, so he and his sons threw it all overboard and in 1492 columbus discovered it

I think that officially makes it a contest. I’ve got 10 quid towards moving expenses for anyone else from Sheffield, that unbelievable piece of shit of a city, who wants to try to top ms. jay’s response. (The “if indeed you are a yank” part is going to be tought to beat, given that I’m not, and given that it comes after that peerless rant that assumes I am. Good luck to you all.)

Alice Thomson in the Telegraph:

The [Millennium] Dome can never stay out of the news for long: it is a fitting mascot for Tony Blair’s Government, a big tent that has failed to live up to its billing.

An 87-year-old pensioner had her heart medication confiscated by security drones at Pearson Airport, her family claims, but it doesn’t exactly ring true. “Prescription medicine with a name that matches the passenger’s ticket, insulin and essential other non-prescription medicines are allowed,” says the GTAA press release, and the granny speaks naught but German, so all signs point to some kind of misunderstanding. But that’s beside the point. The family wins round one simply by virtue of this sentence, which concludes the CP’s report:

Although his mother was in “bad shape” when she got home Saturday morning, she was well enough yesterday to visit her husband’s grave, said Helmut Strohmeier.

Game, set and match.

Stories like this inevitably lead to a discussion of profiling. In the aftermath of the latest foiled terrorist plot in the UK, there was talk of racial or ethnic profiling finally being instituted at airports:

The Government is discussing with airport operators plans to introduce a screening system that allows security staff to focus on those passengers who pose the greatest risk.

The passenger-profiling technique involves selecting people who are behaving suspiciously, have an unusual travel pattern or, most controversially, have a certain ethnic or religious background.

The system would be much more sophisticated than simply picking out young men of Asian appearance. But it would cause outrage in the Muslim community because its members would be far more likely to be selected for extra checks.

There is so much misinformation there. Firstly, passengers are already profiled behaviorally, and have been for years. If you don’t believe me I suggest the following experiment: Take a couple of trips to Pakistan and back. Then rock up to the British Airways ticket desk at Pearson wearing a maniacal grin and buy a one-way first class ticket on a flight to London that leaves in 45 minutes — pay with non-sequential US 100-dollar bills, and check no luggage. Start looking over your shoulder, son. It won’t matter what your name is or what colour your skin is. They’re going to take a longer, harder look at you than at the average traveller.

Indeed, one of the great “arrrgh!” factors about the September 11 attacks is how many of the hijackers were flagged as potential risks: one (Mohammed Atta) in Portland, Maine; three in Boston; and five at Washington’s Dulles Airport (see pages 1-4 of the 9-11 Commission Report). That had nothing to do with racial profiling, as far as we know. Seven of those nine were identified by CAPPS (Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System), while two at Dulles struck check-in agents as suspicious. All that meant at the time was that the hijackers’ luggage wasn’t loaded onto the planes until they boarded, but it is worth noting that even somnambulist pre-9/11 airline security identified nearly half of the hijackers as less than ideal flyers.

Most new airline security measures are based on the principle, to paraphrase Tony Soprano, of putting shit back in the donkey. The 9/11 hijackers were armed with boxcutters, so now we can’t take anything sharp on a plane. (Perhaps this isn’t insanely overcautious, but it wasn’t the boxcutters that won the day. It was the now outmoded “no heroes” rules of engagement for dealing with hijackers. Atta and Co. would never be able to seize those planes today, boxcutters or no boxcutters.)

Then Richard Reid tried to blow up a plane with a shoe bomb, so now some airports make us take off our shoes when we go through security. The Brits foiled the alleged plot to combine liquids onboard an airplane to form a bomb, so now you can’t take orange juice on a plane. (But you can drink orange juice that’s given to you on board. Is OJ dangerous or isn’t it?) Faced with these genuine annoyances, and armed with the ostensibly controversial statement that “all terrorists are Muslims,” people get hung up on the idea that “racial” profiling is the path to security.

It isn’t. You can’t weed out 100 percent of the “Muslims” among the 1.8 million passengers a day who travel on American commercial airliners any more than you can weed out 100 percent of the people who believe Elvis is alive. Focus on people with Muslim-sounding names and you’ll miss Richard Reid. You’ll miss Germaine Lindsay. You’ll miss Steven Chand. The minute you start basing airline security on what passengers’ names sound like to western ears is the minute you give terrorists a whole new recruitment strategy.

It’s not just vigilance that has kept terrorists off airplanes since 9/11 — it’s the fact that terrorists are too stupid to get past current security measures. To quote from the 9/11 Report:

In another Logan terminal, Shehhi, joined by Fayez Banihammad, Mohand al Shehri, Ahmed al Ghamdi, and Hamza al Ghamdi, checked in for United Airlines Flight 175, also bound for Los Angeles. A couple of Shehhi’s colleagues were obviously unused to travel; according to the United ticket agent, they had trouble understanding the standard security questions, and she had to go over them slowly until they gave the routine, reassuring answers.

I mean, come on. Terrorists share many common factors other than their religion — ones they can’t compensate for with name changes and the recruitment of non-Arabs. Only by focusing on those factors can we be confident in our security measures. In the meantime, it should not be problematic to rule out diabetic 89-year-old German grandmothers with serious heart conditions as serious threats.

It’s kinda funny that this Douglas Davis continues to be presented in the National Post as “a member of the Middle East Writers’ Group” when, as Google, numerous news databases, and Paul Wells hilariously show, he appears to have made this group up and installed himself as its sole member. Perhaps Davis isn’t aware of blogs (or Google, or the internet), but I know for a fact the Post’s ed board is. You’d think they’d pass on the message.

Incidentally, Factiva yielded only one reference to this shadowy op-ed cabal, and it comes in an amusing letter to the Spectator’s March 11, 2006 issue:

Having just returned from Jordan, I am bewildered by Douglas Davis’s article on that country’s future (’Will Jordan be the new Palestine?‘, 4 March). He is hot on political theory, but ignores completely the strength of support of the Jordanian people for King Abdullah. This, as for all the king’s predecessors, has been the core continuance enabling the kingdom to survive amid its turbulent neighbours. Visitors are told repeatedly by Jordanians at all levels of society of their admiration for their king. As one said to me, ‘He is one of us, there is no divide.’

Indeed, my experience causes me to wonder if there is something in Mr Davis’s personal political agenda that he should have revealed in his article as he asserted, twice, that King Abdullah had a ‘deeply corrupt relationship with Saddam’s family’, but failed to give his evidence. To sustain his claims and to support the credibility of ‘The Middle East Writers’ Group’ to which he belongs, surely he is duty bound to go to Jordan and state his evidence there, in public.

Kenneth Warren Cranbrook, Kent

Mr Cranbrook seems to be on to him…

The Sun chain continues to threaten The Onion’s relevance:

Bus ride surprisingly entertaining

The Toronto Star’s anti-Island Airport sentiment was practically dripping off the broadsheets into my pancakes this morning, and I posit that David Miller’s house organ is the only newspaper in this country in which this paragraph could appear:

In the scant months since the settlement of the [Toronto Island Airport] bridge dispute, [Bob] Deluce has created an airline from scratch. Staff has been hired — the operation is halfway toward its projected staffing model of 200. Planes have been ordered. The Bombardier Q400s will be configured for 70 passengers, which is quite large when you think about it. In fact, the plane, which goes for about $25 million (U.S.), has jet-like attributes — a smoother, quieter ride than your average turboprop. Some have complained that the craft is too big for the short takeoff and landing, or STOL, requirements of the airport. But a spokesperson for Transport Canada says the Q400 “can manoeuvre and land safely on a 4,000-foot runway.” And the island airport has one of those.

Okay, back it up:

The Bombardier Q400s will be configured for 70 passengers, which is quite large when you think about it.

Let’s just sit back for a moment and bask in the marvellous absurdity of that sentence appearing in a medium-to-high brow newspaper.

Then there’s the idea that Porter Airlines is actually proposing to fly unsafe airplanes out of YTZ:

Some have complained that the craft is too big for the short takeoff and landing, or STOL, requirements of the airport.

“Some” is technically correct. More correct would be “some who live on Toronto Island and/or are fanatically opposed to the Island Airport.” These people want us to believe that in Canada, in 2006, free from governmental encumbrance, you can hurtle a $50 million turboprop full of business people down a runway on the faint hope that it’ll end up in Ottawa and not at the bottom of the inner harbour.

The best part, though, is that David Miller is still trotting out the same ideological absurdities that got him elected:

“The federal government, the provincial government, the city and the people of Toronto have chosen a path of waterfront revitalization,” says Miller. “If we want waterfront revitalization to be a success we can’t have an island airport that becomes a busy commercial airport. It’s just not acceptable.”

I propose a compromise. When Miller actually produces an even partially revitalized waterfront, then we can decide whether we want a wee little airport in the middle of it. (I think it sounds kinda cool, personally.) At present the Island Airport certainly doesn’t clash with the Gardiner Expressway, decrepit light industry and hideous condominium developments made out of green glass and graham crackers that currently comprise Toronto’s shoreline. I’ve said it before: this city has many, many bigger fish to fry. Let Porter Airlines fly, for Christ’s sake.

Cerberus has a good roundup of Jason Kenney’s latest goof. (Briefly: he spoke at a rally in support of a listed terrorist organization, and tried to attend another such rally in Paris, for which rally Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day sent his “best wishes”.)

The original dog from hell concludes: “It is extremely unlikely that Jason Kenney did not know that he was attending a rally organized by a listed terrorist group.”

Nah. I don’t think he’s that stupid or devious. He’s just a buffoon who can’t help getting himself and his party into trouble. Comparing Hezbollah to the Nazis was moronic, and not just on grounds of hyperbole. For one thing it resulted in Stephen Harper’s “both Hezbollah and the Nazi party stand for the elimination of the Jewish nation” response, which must be the oddest, most tortured thing he’s said in office. But more importantly, in deliberately casting Peggy Nash and Borys Wrzesnewskyj as latter-day Chamberlains, Kenney riled them up. And what do riled-up politicians do? They pounce on their opponents with equal and opposite hyperbole, as Peggy Nash did when she found out about Kenney’s little speaking engagement:

“It really means that Jason Kenney is a hypocrite,” New Democrat MP Peggy Nash said in an interview from Cairo.

“He’s speaking to an organization that’s linked to a terrorist organization according to Canada and the U.S. State Department, and he’s done it on the steps of Parliament Hill in the name of the Prime Minister,” she added.

Nash (Parkdale-High Park) said Harper sent Kenney to condemn the opposition MPs “who took their time to try to be helpful.” She said Kenney “went out of his way” to undermine fellow MPs “when if he’d actually looked at what we said, it was similar to what he said at the rally.”

“You can’t have it both ways,” she said. “I’m criticizing his hypocrisy and his oversimplification of complex matters.”

Kenney said Nash’s criticisms are “utterly ridiculous.”

No doubt, JK. But on the occasion of its rockets killing 43 Israeli civilians, you decided to compare Hezbollah to a force that killed six million Jews. You weren’t 100 percent wrong, but you did forfeit your right to judge what is and what isn’t “utterly ridiculous”.

(See also Adam Radwanski’s column in yesterday’s Post (subscribers only), “Liberals reap what they sow.” It’s certainly not just Kenney, and not just Conservatives, who screw themselves over with hyperbole and fake outrage.)

We are apparently in the midst of a “rising wave of title fraud.” Essentially, people are selling houses they don’t own and disappearing with the proceeds, leaving two sets of people in the lurch. The Star today profiles two such victims: an 89-year-old widower and the people who bought his house in Toronto, which wasn’t for sale. At this point neither party can access the house, and each is out of pocket to the lawyers.

Reviczky’s [the widower's] lawyer, Tonu Toome, says it was “very painful” to have to break the news to Reviczky that he may lose his house forever — even though he was an innocent victim of fraud — because Ontario law recognizes the transaction as valid where the purchaser is unaware of the scam.

“I had to tell him that although he would ultimately receive financial compensation for the loss of his home, this would entail legal fees and an application to Ontario’s Land Titles Assurance Fund, which could take several years,” Toome says.

This is ridiculous. If someone steals my television and then sells it to a third party, and police subsequently recover that television, I get my TV back. I can’t see why the same principle wouldn’t apply if someone stole my house. The 89-year-old should get his house back, full stop. Surely that’s common sense.

The matter of the buyers is more complicated, but since the government is essentially admitting these scams are only possible because of weaknesses in the land-registry system, and since the government is now vowing to correct those weaknesses, a simple solution would simply be to compensate them for the full amount of the purchase price. One way or another, there is no conceivable reason for this to take years of litigation and hundreds of hours of lawyers’ fees to sort out.

Upon the tragic death of 20-year-old genius mathematician Robert Barrington Leigh, the Toronto Sun’s Mark Bonokoski offers us a well-written article with this inexplicable title:

Missing brainy kid’s body found

I think the term/abbreviation “WTF?” was designed for cases like this.

It is to the NHLPA’s eternal shame that David Frost was a certified agent until December of last year. (I’d say it was to Bob Goodenow’s eternal shame if I thought he had any.) If the sexual abuse charges against Frost prove true he’ll soon share a Wikipedia entry with Graham James, and quite rightly. In both cases, the question is: how could no one have stopped this from happening?

The thing is, though, Graham James won a Memorial Cup. Knowing the nature of pro sports and the hypercompetitive leagues that groom players for them, one can at least understand people getting starry-eyed. David Frost, on the other hand, never won jack, and it seems like anyone with 50 cents worth of common sense should have seen him for the profoundly creepy, untalented, divisive figure he was.

Some parents apparently weren’t prescient or powerful enough to keep their children out of Frost’s sway. This is tragic for them. But the various teams that employed him and the leagues that allowed that to happen also have blood (or something anyway) on their hands. The fact that Frost’s tentacles stretch all the way to the NHL level makes this a perfect opportunity to ensure that cartoonish weirdos like him are kept out of hockey altogether.