Quebec Student Strike

This is another one for the Bad Subjects website. Go on over and have a look at what I wrote.

Yesterday’s protest was indeed wild, since it was my first Canadian protest. Bigger and louder than anything I remember in the U.S. It would be an understatement to say that I was impressed.

This weekend is taken up with a visit from our friend Carol and the meeting of a working group, so I expect it’ll be all quiet here until early next week.

Almost a week has gone by and there’s no report from the provinces; will we lose the colony?

And I’m still not caught up on other people’s blogs. Guess that’s what happens when you have a party and don’t work on the weekend.

It’s been a great but busy week, including three nights out (though last night was spontaneous). Movie nite featured Be Cool which ought to have been entitled Be Lame. The Rock and Andre 3000 stole every scene they were in, partly because all the Hollywood stars were so busy mugging for the camera that they forgot to actually act. At least the Indian food and dinner company were excellent. Thursday night featured a great lecture on the history of gaslight and fireworks (ok, yes, I’m a geek but in my defense I did tell the speaker that I especially liked the parts of the paper where things blew up) and the subsequent dinner out with the guest and the usual HPS crowd plus a few new folks. James and Nick, the two main HPS organizers, are always very good about insisting that Carrie come to dinner (if not the talk) but she actually came to the talk this time. I was totally worried that she’d find History of Science stuff boring but she actually really liked it. It helps that the talk was quite good. Next week’s topic is alchemical fraud, but I’ll have to miss it, alas. Last night featured a spontaneous dinner out with our colleagues Ting and Bronwen which was lovely. I’d originally planned to finish reading a book to review and to go nowhere near my office, but the coffee shop was full, and I’d just had lunch with Tom Porcello, an ethnomusicologists who writes on sound recording, and I was real close to the office. Ah well! So much for getting work done. . . . I did find out that through a misprint I am listed as department chair in the new undergraduate bulletin. Since the new chair has not yet been announced, you might think this is a bad omen. I hope not: I’m already signed on for other administrative duty next year (graduate program director) and I’ve only been at McGill one year, which would make me a bad candidate. Nevertheless, the office staff thought it was the funniest thing in the world to congratulate me on my new post. Cruel!

Thanks to my colleague Darin, this week I learned what the “notwithstanding clause” is: it is one of the weirdest bits of constitutional law I have ever heard. Canada has a charter of rights and freedoms, which is sort of like a bill of rights. Except that there’s the clause that says that the government can pass a law “notwithstanding” the charter. For instance, in Quebec, if you run a business your sign must have French on it. The “notwithstanding clause” means that you can’t plead “freedom of expression” for an English-only sign. I understand the logic there, but you can quickly see how this can get out of control. It’s at the center of debates around whether the government can pass a law, for instance, on same-sex marriage.

One of these days, I will update my tiny blogroll and introduce you to the other blogs I read, which are almost exclusively authored by friends or acquaintances. But not today.

Misc.

and I don’t mean McGill Institute for the Study of Canada.

–Last night we threw a party for the ages. It was outstanding, massive and eminently positive. I am a little woozy today but in that good way that one is. As I said to Carrie, “I am quite pleased with us.” Our new friends and students are all awesome. Also our blonde cat turned out to be quite the party hound. Inasmuchas a cat can be a “hound.” Additionally, our “great room” is the perfect dance floor. Speaking of the floor, I must go get the vaccuum after completing this entry.

Two things that have caught my mind while cruising the ‘net:

—cartoonist Tom Tomorrow asks after the etymology of “wingnut” and “asshat”

—Charlie Bertsch wonders about what’s at stake in a guy calling himself feminist

And a question raised by the shooting of four Alberta mounties in a drug bust this week: what will happen to Canada’s slow movement toward more sensible drug policy?

History Question

So I read this book review over at salon.com on the forced removal of the acadians by the British, and it raises some interesting questions. If you’re talking about the land that now makes up the Maritimes during the 1500s-1700s, is that “Canadian history” or “American History” or something else? There were the usual range of letters from readers, but it does occur to me that we have a bit of a classification issue on our hands.

Note: Salon.com has a stupid and annoying ad policy. Thanks to my friend Steven Rubio, I have a free sub, otherwise I wouldn’t read their stuff.

Now Available in Tampa

We’ve been in Tampa for two days now, and it’s definitely a southern “new” city. The conference hotel, like the Jungian archetypal conference hotel, is located near nothing of great significance, and extorts its residents for meals, coffee, etc. As the faculty spouse, I have studiously avoided the conference, opting instead for the vacation-ritual of meals punctuated by not much else (at lunch yesterday, we actually heard people leaving the place talking about where they would go for dinner). Our time here has been spent with our friends Carol and Mrak and their son Tony. Yesterday’s big outing was to the aquarium, where I saw the biggest fish I’d ever seen, some cool sharks, and so forth. We tried to take pictures. The day before we went to the Tampa power plant, which creates a bunch of warm water (used for cooling) that attracts manatees. Unfortunately, we did not see any and all we got out of it was a plastic souvenir. It was one of those “make your own souvenir” things where you give a machine a dollar and it injects plastic into a mould. Oh, how mighty DIY has fallen! Anyway, it was fun and we are slowly warming to our plastic manatee, who needs a little trimming and still has that “freshly burnt plastic” smell. I fear he may not survive the trip back to the cold north, however.

Our last two before coming to Tampa were also relatively uneventful, though we did drop down to Sarasota for an afternoon/evening. On the way, we also picked up another six Cds from a store where you can listen to them beforehand, so we did a little better. The new Thievery Corporation is great.

Back to Sarasota. Our colleague David Crowley is restoring a house down there and so we took advantage of the coincidence to have a very nice dinner at a fish place (Carrie had grouper, the same species as the shark-sized fish I would see at the aquarium two days later) and enjoy excellent conversation. David’s house is an old Florida house but it is located in a neighborhood that is rapidly going upscale, which means that there are McMansions with gates and BMWs parked in the driveway right next to, well, old Florida houses. But then real estate seems like the biggest industry in the parts of Florida we saw. If it’s not actually the biggest, it is surely the biggest in our imagination of the place.

Tomorrow we get up at the crack of dawn to make sure we’re at the airport on time for our departure back home to Montreal via Chicago. You know we’re not going to be late.

The trip as a whole was restful in the way that vacations are restful, though much of my life (and work) in Montreal is still present to me. Perhaps that’s because I took work with; perhaps it’s because I haven’t been away long enough. Either way, I got the vacation I deserved – except that I’ve obviously got a thing or two to learn about tanning. I’m excited to go home and get back to my (still relatively new) life, even though I know it will kick my ass for the next six weeks.