What I’m Blogging

…they lit huge bonfires to tempt the sun to come back…

In the northern hemisphere, today is the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year and the longest night. It’s officially the first day of winter and one of the oldest known holidays in human history. Anthropologists believe that solstice celebrations go back at least 30,000 years, before humans even began farming on a large scale. Many of the most ancient stone structures made by human beings were designed to pinpoint the precise date of the solstice. The stone circles of Stonehenge were arranged to receive the first rays of midwinter sun.

Ancient peoples believed that because daylight was waning, it might go away forever, so they lit huge bonfires to tempt the sun to come back. The tradition of decorating our houses and our trees with lights at this time of year is passed down from those ancient bonfires.

They’re back… Yes the contract that came and went, and then left and returned, only to depart, has (dramtic pause) come back with a vengence. Sometimes you get what you want, sometimes you get gum on the bottom of your shoe that you can’t get rid of.

Seems like the client and the agency are now in sync about where the rubber meets the road, and I am engaged for a four month gig starting just after new years.

Please, no rush to congradulations. It’s early and the whole thing could evaporate in a puff of smoke again.

Candies Seen Only At Christmas

The Christmas season in the extended multifaceted social maze of the modern Canadian family starts early. There are multiple families to visit, multiple suppers with all the fixings to eat. Mine started today at my Mother’s house. Later there will be a visit to my Father’s, and then My Father-in-law’s.

My kids have even more of a journey as they must do Christmas at their Mother’s, their maternal Grandparents, and then the family of their Step-Father. It’s a busy, hectic time, full of travel, turkey, gravy, a second helping of turkey, and very likely a turkey sandwiches near midnight after everyone else is sleeping.

Many traditions come and go at Christmas time, but an enduring one since my earliest recollection is the crystal bowels of Bassett’s Licorice Candy Allsorts… Naturally flavoured and available to fine families everywhere. Sometimes the stale ones taste like the 1899 originals

It wouldn’t be Christmas without them.

It’s the birthday of Jane Austen, born in Steventon, Hampshire, England (1775). Austen is the only novelist who published before Charles Dickens whose books still sell thousands of copies every year. Although she never got married herself, but she is best known for books about women who do get married, including Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Pride and Prejudice (1813). She did fall in love as a young woman, but the man she loved had no money for marriage. Later, she got a proposal from an older wealthy gentleman. She said yes, but then found herself unable to sleep that night. In the morning she did something that was almost unheard of at the time: she told her fiancé that she had changed her mind, because she did not love him.

…There’s no one to touch Jane when you’re in a tight place…

Austen’s first two books, Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Pride and Prejudice (1813), were great successes in her lifetime, but after that her readers grew less enthusiastic. Neither Mansfield Park (1814) nor Emma (1816) was as popular. It was only after her death that she became one of the most popular novelists from the 19th century. After the First World War, Jane Austen novels were prescribed to shell-shocked British soldiers for therapy, because the psychologists found that Austen helped them recover their sense of the world they’d known before the war. Rudyard Kipling said, “There’s no one to touch Jane [Austen] when you’re in a tight place.”

Yesterday came and went, the contract ended, and surprise, surprise, the client wants me back for January and February. The worm not only turned again, it is by now positively spinning at RPM levels that could be harnessed to power a small city. This contract is becoming the Hotel California; you can check out, but you can’t leave.

…I’ll be home for Christmas…

Well now the client and the agency need to fight over the details. I signed a contract with the agency as you remember, but the client didn’t want to continue. Now the client wants to continue, but the agency doesn’t. I figure that in any battle about who is paying and who is getting paid, the client with cash will pay the piper and call the tune.

So it’s not over yet. It’s only getting more bizarre. If they can’t play nice and share their toys, it’s no different from where I thought I was going to be a month ago, and I’ll be home for Christmas while they fuss about it.

No it’s not some armageddon inspired rapture tale. Besides, I’m pretty sure I don’t have a ticket for that “flight”. Rather it’s the start of my last day at the TV station.

Half a year flies by so fast in retrospect, and at times it feels like I’ve been there a lifetime. In any event It’s head first into the land of the underemployed, at least until after the holidays anyway.

Goodbye desk.

Goodbye coffee machine.

Goodbye guy who lurks around the office and nobody knows what you do.

Goodbye.

It was on this day in 1791 that the Bill of Rights was adopted by the United States, becoming the most sacred and debated laws in the history of our country. One of the people most responsible for the content of the Bill of Rights was a man named George Mason, who might not have even been a part of the process if he hadn’t been a lifelong friend of George Washington’s. He was a wealthy landowner in Virginia, and he liked to debate political ideas, but he wasn’t interested in politics because he shied away from public life.

…all people are born with certain rights, and that government’s purpose should be to protect those rights…

Then, when the Revolutionary War broke out and George Washington was named Commander of the Continental Army, George Mason reluctantly took over his friend’s seat on the Virginia legislature. When the Virginia legislators held a convention to reorganize their state government, George Mason arrived late and found himself assigned to the committee to write the new state constitution.

So it was only by chance that Mason wound up writing Virginia’s “Declaration of Rights.” Mason had read the philosopher John Locke as a young man, and he shared Locke’s idea that all people are born with certain rights, and that government’s purpose should be to protect those rights. And George Mason believed that the best way to protect those rights would be to list them in the constitution itself. Virginia’s “Declaration of Rights,” was the first time in modern history that a government specified the absolute rights of individuals.

While George Mason was working on Virginia’s “Declaration of Rights,” he took under his wing a 25-year-old legislator named James Madison. Madison was deeply influenced by Mason’s ideas about freedom, and he passed them along to his friend Thomas Jefferson.

Mason mostly sat on the sidelines during the rest of the Revolutionary War, but after the war he was asked to participate in the Constitutional Convention. The trip from his home in Virginia to Philadelphia was the greatest distance he ever traveled, and it was a trip he quickly began to regret. He found that he disagreed with the other delegates on numerous issues, especially slavery, which he thought should be outlawed in the new constitution.

But more than anything, George Mason fought for the inclusion of a list of rights in the national constitution, just as he had written it into the Virginia Constitution. But when he brought his idea for a bill of rights to a vote, it failed by a wide margin. And so, when it came time to sign to new U.S. Constitution, George Mason was one of the only men there who refused. His decision created quite a stir, and it even ruined his lifelong friendship with George Washington. The two men never visited each other again.

But Mason hoped that his protest would encourage an eventual passage of a bill of rights, and it was ultimately his former protégé, James Madison, who made the Bill of Rights a reality. Madison introduced the Bill of Rights into the first session of Congress in 1789, and he used Virginia’s “Declaration of Rights” as the model. Madison originally supported the adoption of 17 amendments, which was eventually trimmed to 12, of which 10 were adopted, including the freedom of religion, freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, the right to privacy, and the right to a fair trial. George Mason died in 1792, a year after those freedoms and rights became law.

Buddha Fortune Cookie

Apparently, Buddha knows something that I don’t. That’s OK. He being all enlightened and such. For me, the mere mortal with two days left to go in the contract, things are not as clear.

There are no assurances of anything coming soon, but I’m going to blindly accept the smiling Buddha’s optimism. I’m going to take that leap of faith and throw myself at the ground, hope to miss, and thereby learn how to fly.

Crazy? Maybe.

Fun? Absolutely.