green

I live in Toronto and I have never been to Grano although I have heard wonderful things about it. I should go.

Now I know what the Flying Nun's son looks like.... I can die happy.

Yippeeeee!!!!! Congrats to senor Yoda!

I was gonna say I'd do ya, but I wouldn't.:Banane40: I would be your friend, however. And if we were crossing the border I would hide a kilo or two in your folds of skin. Just think of all the money we could make,.......eh! Of course you know that I am just talking, don't you?:success1: One thing is for sure, you've got your own parachute! LOL

Yep, Devana, I had been feeling the same queasy way. In fact I hadn't been feeling in this much need of political Gravol since Mulroney had his giant chin up Reagan's arse. But it would appear that our Conservative government is turning out to be a more unusual animal than we had thought and it may actually have a backbone! It seems to have stood up to the rednecks who wanted to undo the legislation allowing same sex marriages, we women still have the right to choose, and the government seems to have stood up to Bush and his whacked out Attorney guy in this business of l'affaire Arar. Quelle surprise! I do, nevertheless, dress to the left of this party, eh.

From what I have been reading in articles about China and its birth policies it appears that these policies have already resulted in a terrible imbalance of the sexes in a generation of young men and women. It seems that young women are largely missing from rural China for two reasons: many fewer have been born and of those who were these young women have made it their practice to leave the rural areas in order to seek work in the cities. These two factors have left these villages socially destabilized. Their populations consist of elderly people and of comparatively large numbers of un- or under-employed young men, men who are in their twenties and who pass their days drinking, gambling, and fighting. These young men know that they will never find wives, nor will they have families. They are a lost generation of men and they are alienated from society as a result. The Chinese government is aware that this imbalance is a dangerous thing and that a stable society requires that its young males have their energies best harnessed by raising their own families. Nevertheless, rural folk still want to have boy children and still view girls as being valueless even though they are already seeing a generation of lost, alienated, and lonely young men who will never have the chance to settle down and start their families. Any culture where there are a lot of unemployed young men will likely be less stable. Young men who are left without anything meaningful to do to fill their days have a lot of energy, a lot of testosterone, and a lot of rage. This is why the crime statistics for violent/impulsive crimes are higher in areas where there is a) poverty b)unemployment and c)lots of young people. I have heard it mentioned that this is one of the reasons that much of the Middle East is such a mess: there is no work and there is a large population of young males. It has been suggested, according to some of the articles which I have read, that China may be growing very concerned about this very thing: that the country will be flooded for some generations to come with a superabundance of emotionally unanchored males due to the sexist response to its birth control policies.

Yah, I can imagine that there are a few folks who inhabit the right in Washington who would be happy to invade Canada.:Banane40: After all, it was Pat Robertson who called us Soviet Canuckistan and members of our previous government ran afoul of Washington by virtue of their thinly, very thinly veiled contempt for BuSh and his gang. Diplomatic relations between the two countries were certainly at a low until our new Conservative government took office.:paranoid Yep, I miss TOM, too. His comments were always interesting and well-thought out. I hope he comes home soon.

Wow! So that's the story of l'histoire de fromage, as the French might say. Thanks a bunch for filling us newbies in, FunnyDuddies. Those really do sound like the Days of Terror. And the Cheese Brigade sounds brilliant, kinda like you were all channelling the spirit of Wisconsin or a Brie double creme. :clap2:

My ex-husband was a musician. Like most musicians he was poor and unfaithful. It is more fun being a musician than being married to one.

There is a tendency to want to place kids with blood members, I believe. This can work out just fine when it applies to cases where the mother is a drug addict and living on the streets and it is the grandparents who apply to raise their grandchildren.

There's a couple who live across the street from me, he's a sociology prof and she is a family lawyer, who came up to Canada during the time of the Vietnam War. The sad thing now is that our immigration rules have changed and our new crop of evaders who have landed here will likely be sent back home. These are young men who have enlisted and have sometimes been sent over for a tour of duty in Iraq. They have come home and find that they don't want to go over there and so they and their young families have crossed the border. With our current immigration rules their only option is to plead refugee status and so far this seems to be going unsuccessfully. Of course until recently our new Conservative minority government had been making super nice with BuSh and company. The mess over the Maher Arar situation has served to cool the love affair off somewhat. The demand that all folks crossing the Canadian-U.S. border present passports hasn't won Washington many friends in our capital, either, for this has thrown up a serious barrier to tourism and trade which customarily goes on between our two countries.

No compassion here for that gasbag!

There was a case in Toronto a year or so ago where a grandparent asked for and received custody of 4 of her grandchildren who had been seized by Children's Aid. The entire extended family lived on welfare and such monies as were contributed by those who were working. There was quite a large number of them living in one house. Well, for some reason two of the four children were isolated to one room and slowly over a period of years both maltreated and slowly starved to death. The grandmother had them drinking water out of the toilet and eating food out of the dog's bowl when she did let them outside of their room, a room which was underheated in winter, by the way. After one of the two children died the family called an ambulance. The kid, who was 5 years old, weighed less than an year old. His body was covered in faeces, urine, and mould. The other child, still alive, was in the same condition. The trial was interesting. The grandmother was found to be of subnormal intelligence with behaviour issues and it was discovered that one of her own babies had died under suspect circumstances when she herself was 17. These are folks who shouldn't be breeding but they do. Children's Aid had goofed when assigning these kids to their grandmother. They hadn't troubled to do a background check. All this info on granny was already in their files. I have told you this story because my hunch is that this family likely is as stupid and as whacked out as the parents of this baby are.

Yep, my experience of abortion was much the same as that of Alexandra's. The array of emotions I felt, including my initial denial, all hinged upon my discovery that I was pregnant. The abortion was the solution to the blind terror which was one of the feelings which I felt. I have never felt guilt or regret over this decision. An interesting side note, perhaps: my mother did feel regret from time to time; she would have liked me to have given her a grandchild.

That would be the evil and crazy Fred Phelps that you are thinking of. He is a serious nutbar.

I read something about that, Devana, but don't know all the details.

Yep, me too. Tell us newbies the tales of the olden days, Laurend, pleeease.

Peaches' perspective on this debate is an interesting one. It is certainly true that current technology permits us to rescue preemies who would have perished in other eras and still do in those countries where medical resources are scarce. Of course this technology which we take for granted is very, very expensive. It may, therefore, be argued that those women who do discover that they are carrying foetuses who will be born with gross defects should be permitted to be able to make the decision to destroy them without being forced to deal with any outside judgements. It may be that this issue of the lost pre-born might seem kind of irrelevant when stacked up against those losses of human lives which routinely occur as part of the cost of daily living in other parts of the world. The truth is that most of us who post here do live inside the bubble of affluence. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this. It has been only our blind good luck that we have been born in affluent, civilized and democratic societies and not in one of those environments where human life is little more than suffering, followed by an early death - an early death for sure when contrasted to the average age of death as set by our affluent, post-industrial western countries.

My mother came from an interesting background. On her father's side the family was what is called "landed gentry" and there are a number of titles in the family. Indeed my mother's maiden name was what is often referred to as a double barrelled one - this means that her surname came with a hyphen. Nevertheless, she chose to marry a Jewish refugee who had managed to make it over to England during the 2nd World War. They opted to emigrate and they ended up in Canada, their second choice. Their first choice was Australia, by the way. My mum never had much in the way of good jewellery. She had a few antique pieces, some of which were set with poorly cut precious stones. She had her own copy of her family's signet ring and she had also amassed a few other pieces of real jewellery. Although she had always said that her jewllery, such as it was, would eventually go to me, her only daughter, she ended up giving most of her few finer pieces away before she died. I spent much of my adult life being careful about my finances and it wasn't until I was almost 50, living in a very nice house which I had mostly paid off and involved in a stable relation, when I received my first offer of serious jewellery - and here I am speaking of the gold and diamond type. It was at this point that my mate trotted me down to Tiffany and bought me a saphire and diamond ring. Since then I have obtained a few other serious pieces of jewellery, or bling!, thanks to my husband for the most part. The oh so sad bit is that I suit silver much better than I do gold. I do have a lot of silver jewellery, and some of it is quite dramatic because it is so large and so intricate. Lots of my silver stuff is set with semi-precious stones. So that is my boring story about my relationship with bling.:notagree

These two individuals are obviously of subnormal intelligence as well as living in flip-city. Folks like this make for a compelling defense of abortion.

Cutting the cheese.........!

Actually, Lucy, your politics would be considered fairly mainstream up here in Canada. Same sex marriage and prostitution are legal up here. Our last government was trying to decriminalize simple possession of marijuana but had to give into pressures exerted by Washington to drop this initiative. Our gun laws are much more stringent. I've almost never met anyone who has fired a gun and nobody I know owns one.

No, Musicalmomma, you don't need that much money to immigrate to Canada. I have heard that you might need $10,000 but I got this figure from a blog of an American couple who decided to immigrate to Canada and I guess this money would have covered the pair of them at that. From what I understand our government has a point system and such things as knowledge of English/French, level of education, career, and the amount of cash you have in order to support yourself when you first arrive all count as points. The candidate also has to pass a medical test. This is one way to be considered for immigrant status. The process takes a couple of years, I hear, and must be done while the candidate is living outside of Canada. Another way to get immigrant status is to get work here as a nanny and this is how many Phillipinas and Carribean women get into the country. They are hired by Canadians as live-in nannies, and arrive here on work visas. After working here for the requisite number of years they can then apply for immigrant status which is equivalent to the American green card. We also accept refugees. These are people who land here first and then claim that they cannot go home because they will be persecuted. These individuals are housed, fed, and clothed by the government while they wait to have their cases reviewed and a decision made. They are not allowed to work at this point. We also have our illegals but most of our troublesome ones - in Toronto at least - seem to come from the Carribean Islands. The ones who make the media are young black males who form part of the gang activity that we are now seeing in this city. These gangs appear to have an almost exclusively black membership and they hit the media whenever a young male is gunned down. Life up here is very, very safe if you are not a young black male. We have a very large Portuguese community in Toronto and many of them work in the construction industry. Not so long ago it seemed as though the Canadian government was going to promise amnesty to our illegals. This had the surprising result of flushing a lot of Portuguese illegals out of the woodwork, so to speak. It was discovered that these men and their families had been peacefully living and working here for a long, long time. They were good citizens and the backbone of the construction industry. Unfortunately for them, once they had made themselves known they were deported despite the outcry made by the Portuguese community on their behalf.

Thanks, Yoda. I should have done something weeks ago about this infection but I went into denial (because it is so gross) and hoped it would clear up on its own and it hasn't!:sick And I have had this stupid cold for about four weeks now, too! Blehhhhhhhh!:sick :sick I can't wait to see my doc this coming Monday.:help:

The one ad which I had seen and investigated thus far was from a pro-life group and lead to a website encouraging pregnant teens to keep their babies. I was appalled but not discouraged from returning to this website.