Meditations on Dominion Day, 2025
Repairing the Deck Chairs on the Titanic
Happy Dominion Day, I will not call it “Canada Day” and The Red Ensign is my flag, not the Red Maple Leaf approved in 1965 as a sop to Les Quebecois and as per usual? … didn’t work … This country is pretty much a pair of mutually-loathing Siamese twins, conjoined at the hip… and chest… and head… and naughty parts…
Hugh MacLennan wrote I think it was in The Watch That Ends the Night, although it may have been Two Solitudes, of how we — or at least half of us — achieved a sense of nationhood in the trenches of World War I; 20 million at least immolated in that conflagration… Then 20 years later that conflict was resumed with World War II and Canada created — on all sides — the second largest army and third largest navy… (maybe it was the other way ‘round…) Like World War I, fought to make a gang of rich banksters richer — I’ll be nice and use a somewhat delicate euphemism… 🤔
65 million in that second round, and while we lost 44,090 young men during same, Russia did the heavy lifting and lost 20 million of hers, and Germany? Germany twice in a century was left utterly crushed; after 1945 according to James Bacque some 2.5 million German soldiers were deliberately allowed to die of exposure and starvation, and now Germany — like the rest of the declining West — is merely an appendage of Israel The Banksters rather, where you speak the truth on your peril, as David Irving and Ursula Haverbeck discovered to their sorrow; the former foolishly sued Deborah Lipstadt for defamation and was utterly ruined in consequence; the latter died at the age of 96 while awaiting her latest prison term for doing so. It takes a special kind of malevolence to inflict such a thing on someone that age... Meanwhile The Myth of German Villany remains on my “booket list” …
Unlike the 65 million Gentiles who fought and died on their behalf, and despite the Holocaust and purportedly 6 million dead, the world’s Jewish population somehow and mysteriously grew by something like 430,000 souls between 1933 and 1945… 🤔
And so, Dominion Day. Over to A&W with Medea for “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” but if the renos were still ongoing, to White Spot instead and regardless put it on the MasterCard. As per, too much month and too little paycheque, and my vaunted, much anticipated pay raise looks like it might work out to $40—$50 more per paycheque than before… Whoop-de-diddly-whoop-de-do… 🤔
In the event we wound up at A&W where we had a pleasant breakfast for $39.70, as the price of everything thanks to Justin Castreau’s and now Mark Carnage’s enlightened fiscal, immigration, and social policies go up and up and up and up and up…
Top and bottom, a pair of sequential serial numbered Weimar Republic Deutsche Marks for DM 50,000 each, issued before the hyperinflation really began to bite: They were still printing on both sides of the notes you see. 🙄💩
In between, $100 trillion dollars from the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe. Ah, the wonders of Communism. 😵💫 When the planned hyperinflation hits the wall in The West, the Morons that are 98% of us will of course, welcome the Central Bank Digital Currencies brought in to replace our moribund cash… not to mention the Universal Basic Incomes ‘cause machines will shortly be doing all the work for us.
Truly, you can’t fix “stupid”, no matter how you try… 🤨💣🕳
Mind you the illegal migrants to Woke Canuckistan are doing just fine thank you and despite the winters; each and everyone one of them, $8,300/month tax free on my plugged nickels; in 2017 Justin Castreau having signed on our behalf, The UN Compact on Migration... which we were told was purely symbolic and non-binding on signatory countries.
As Dr. Lecter remarked in entirely different circumstances, our Governments tell us a great many things.
Lady Carlotta having departed soprano saxophone in hand some time ago and no other items for repair from anyone else, my hands have turned towards the resurrection of a couple of baritone saxophones that have been in my pile since 2021; a Buescher “Four Hundred” from 1967 I inadvertently purchased from eBay, a broken B♭ side key I was able to silver-solder back together but no neck (found one for what I paid for the saxophone) and a Buescher “True Tone” from 1925 I bought for $10 that my comrade-in-arms Howard alerted me to — or rather the remains of a Buescher True-tone from 1925: It’s missing about half its keys, and again, no neck…
I found via eBay, an outfit in Texas calling themselves “Texas Horn Trader” who claim among other things to have myriad salvaged parts for old Buescher saxophones. I’ll have to ask them if they also have a bell for this Salvation Army cornet:
And a mouthpipe for this.. not sure if it’s a euphonium or a four-valved E♭ or just possibly F, tuba; it says “made for JW York & Son - Grand Rapids, Michigan” on the bell:
Meanwhile the two saxophones — never mind they’re 42 years apart in age — are practically identical; I hope to sell them both for $1,200 each. They’ll look a lot better when I’m done than they do at the moment. Likelihood alas is, I’ll be lucky to give them away: They don’t have a “Low A” key you see. Only go down to the low B♭. No-one is interested in a baritone saxophone without the Low A. 😥
Pursuant to repair work and Medea not having washed it in awhile, off to Wally World yesterday to buy another towel to cover my work bench; as Douglas Adams might put it “about the most massively useful thing a repair shop can have”; the instruments are rather delicate, I prefer something soft for them to lie on:
Great minds think alike.. Stefan on his weekly chat show and Gerald talking to Mike; they both remarked; Stefan at the age of 8, visiting the Freak Show at the Canadian National Exhibition; guess that would be 1966, paying a nickle to see the tattooed lady and the fat lady and the bearded lady.. Gerald on the other hand? “You talk about a 300 pound hog? I see them on the street every day! We used to have this thing called “The Ringling Brother’s and Barnum & Bailey’s Circus”; they shut it down. You know why? They used to have the fat man and the tattooed lady and the lady with the beard — they’re walking up and down the street all over the place!”
Indeed. Strolling through Wally World, you get to see all that and worse! — for free! I see young women covered in disfiguring tattoos, must have paid thousands of dollars for them. Did they stop to think how those tattoos will look 30 years hence when they’ve faded and blended and their skin is no longer smooth and supple? Evidently not.
But taking pictures in Wally World could conceivably get me in trouble, meanwhile I was in trouble enough in that labyrinth trying to find the towels, and it seemed all the aisles were marked thus:
What could those everyday low prices refer to? “Aye, there’s the rub!” … but somehow I found them.. then out of the place fast as my little legs could carry me… but first, the self-serve checkout, for which you need a PhD in computer science to negotiate, cash very much not preferred:
Famished from my ordeal I thought some sustenance at Scrawny Ronnie’s under Wally’s roof; a Big Mac, Small Fries and Chocolate Shake, the whole experience much like eating in Winston Smith’s canteen at The Ministry of Truth:
And as God is my witness, I actually ate this:
Home, stopping at Industrial Plastics for two bottles of contact cement, only store in Victoria that stocks the original formulation of contact cement, and thus, it actually works… get my tiny shop tidied up, dig my oboes out of the closet, thanks to Jim Doty MD (possibly more on that later) I’m entertaining the notion of blowing the dust out of them, not sure with whom; Medea and I are both Persona Non Grata in the civic bands we used to play in because we did not and never will, take The Lethal Injections.
And thus, two days in the life, as we and Western Civilization swirl around and around the toilet bowl into perdition…
Better month than I in Oz. Just been debanked because I refused to tell WESTPAC what I was going to spend my own money on. 🤷 TOO LATE HA HA. 🪙🏅🥇🥈 😉
Cheered my morning coffee here in Spain 🇪🇸
Thank you 🙏