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Cross of St. Andrew

Saint Andrew is the Patron Saint of Scotland, and St. Andrew’s Day is celebrated by Scots around the world on the 30th November. The flag above is the Cross of St. Andrew, and this is widely displayed as a symbol of national identity.

It’s Good to be Scottish

…the safest road to Hell is the gradual one…

It’s the birthday of C. S. (Clive Staples) Lewis, born in Belfast, Ireland, (1898), the author of the children’s series about the land of Narnia. He also wrote The Screwtape Letters (1941), in which he wrote, “The safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.” He was a confident Oxford philosopher, not at all prepared to find himself a Christian convert. To his friend Owen Barfield he wrote: “Terrible things have happened to me. The ‘Spirit’ or ‘Real I’ is showing an alarming tendency to becoming much more personal and is taking the offensive, and behaving just like God. You’d better come on Monday at the latest or I may have entered a monastery.” He said, “Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.”

I just finished this book. I borrowed it from a friend and I could not put it down. I got right into the historical setting of the piece and with the plight of the characters against terrible odds. It was suspenseful and engaging. I may need to put it on my Christmas list so I’ll have a copy when I give my friend’s copy back.

Roth, Phillip. 2005.The Plot Against America Vintage. ISBN: 1400079497

The Plot Against America is a fictional work which follows an alternative history of the United States in the 1940’s. We are told the tale the from the point of view of the young Phil Roth, who watches the destruction of his family, neighbourhood and country. In the alternative history, America elects Charles Lindberg President over FDR and the slow deliberate march towards Fascism, neutrality, and the destruction of the American Jew begins.

The scary thing (after you’ve suspended your disbelief that such a thing could come to pass) is how easily America slips into the grip of the fascists. How patriotism, love of country and sense of duty are turned towards absolute evil.

It was a great read. The suspense is magnified through the lens of a young Jewish boys’s experience of his family’s hardships. We think to ourselves that “it could never happen here.” This book shows in chilling steps how it could.

Available from Amazon Canada, UK and US

On this day in 1942, the movie Casablanca had its premiere at the Hollywood Theater in New York City. Casablanca is the story of Rick Blaine, an American nightclub owner in North Africa during World War II. One night, he is approached by a French Resistance fighter named Victor and his wife Ilsa, who are trying to get papers to escape to America. Ilsa happens to be Rick’s true love, who deserted him when the Nazis invaded Paris.

The movie took ten weeks to shoot. The original title was “Everybody Comes to Rick’s.” One of the actors considered for the part of Rick was Ronald Regan, but the producer eventually settled on Humphrey Bogart. The script was constantly rewritten throughout the shooting, and not even the writers knew whether Ilsa would end up with Rick or Victor at the end. The reviews were mixed, but it was a box office hit, and it went on to with the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1943.

Casablanca now one of the best-loved and most quoted movies of all time. It contains lines such as, “Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she had to walk into mine,” “The problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world,” “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” and, “Here’s looking at you, kid.”

Available from Amazon Canada, UK and US

Winter is on! In the northern lands that celebrate Thanksgiving before Halloween, the white fluffy stuff is all over the place. And I’m not talking about the stuff you’d get stopped at the border for either. Sure it isn’t December 21^st, it isn’t the official first day of winter, but when has that ever stopped Mother Nature before?

In honour of this auspicious moment, and largely due to the fact that I really didn’t want to drive in this latest dumping of the fluffy white traffic congestion creator, I used my managerial prerogative to declare a work-at-home “snow day” for my staff. Not many issues to deal with at Gigantic Concrete today. The Americans are stuffing their faces with turkey and all the fixings, and the Canadians are shivering around the space heaters trying to stay warm. Either way, no one is picking up the phone the report a network problem. It’s like Christmas a month early.

The room was shrouded in an institutional lime green. Scant light shone through the small window, highlighting the cracks between the cinder blocks. It was just before dawn and time seemed frozen in an odd gray half-light. On the wall a multitude of tubes and cables protruded, snaking their way down the headboard. In this space, time was not measured by the tick of the clock. That would have been too regular, too exact, too sure. Here, time was measured by the torturous flow of dripping saline and the uneven skip of a heartbeat and each moment was an epoch of unrelenting agony.

More…

It was on this day in 2000 that the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments in the case of Bush Vs. Gore, to decide whether the hand recounts of the Presidential election in the state of Florida were lawful.

…As a result, 60,000 undervotes and 113,000 overvotes were never officially examined or counted…

The first recount had been done by machines, and in that recount George W. Bush’s lead had shrunk from 1,784 votes to only 327. But there had been problems with thousands of ballots in four counties: Volusia, Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade. Al Gore asked for manual recounts in three of those four counties, Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade, which also happened to be heavily Democratic counties.

What became so controversial was the fact that there were many so-called undervotes in these counties that had been disqualified and never counted. In the case of punchcard ballots, some of them simply hadn’t been punched properly, and election workers had to determine the voter’s intent.

The Republican Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who had helped campaign for George W. Bush, tried to stop all the manual recounts. She announced that she would certify the election for George W. Bush before the recounts were finished. After a series of court cases, the Florida State Supreme Court ruled that the Secretary of State had to give time for the recounts to be completed, and the court set the deadline for Sunday, November 26.

The day before Thanksgiving, the Bush legal team turned to Supreme Court to try to stop the recounts. The Bush lawyers claimed that the Florida State Supreme Court had violated an obscure law from 1887, prohibited states from changing the rules after the date of that election, and that the Florida Court had usurped the Florida legislature’s exclusive powers to set the procedures for selecting electors, as provided for by Article II of the United States Constitution.

At the time, most legal commentators believed that the Supreme Court would not get involved in the case, because a majority of the justices believed strongly in states’ rights. It was Justice Anthony Kennedy who made the initial decision that the court should hear the case.

The Supreme Court ultimately ruled twice. First, they ruled that the Florida State Supreme Court had to clarify its own ruling. But when the Florida Sate Supreme Court responded by ordering a statewide recount of undervotes, the Supreme Court intervened and stopped the recount from going forward. It eventually ruled in a 5 to 4 decision that a statewide recount would violate the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment, because there was no statewide standard for counting undervotes. The decision effectively decided the election for George W. Bush. As a result, 60,000 undervotes and 113,000 overvotes were never officially examined or counted.

From the Writer’s Almanac by Garrison Keillor
Available by e-mail daily.

It was on this day in 1889 the Jukebox made its debut at the Palais Royale Saloon in San Francisco. It was called a “nickel-in-the-slot player” and consisted of an Edison Class M Electric Phonograph inside a free-standing oak cabinet to which were attached four stethoscope-like tubes. Each tube could be activated by depositing a coin so that four people could listen to a single recording at one time.