Debating the Debates

Just a little cleaning up to do after the U.S. presidential debate this week...

Who knows for sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if more Canadians tuned into this week's debate in Nashville between Barack Obama and John McCain than they have for the Canadian election debates.

Both countries, of course, have election campaigns going on now. Canada votes on Oct. 14. The Americans vote in early November.

Due to late work nights, some genuine apathy and other issues, I haven't watched one Canadian debate. The only debate I DID watch was the one in Nashville this week. So, several observations.

First, I'd give Obama a B+ for his performance in Nashville. He looked polished, authoritative, reasoned, confident and showed great restraint, in my view, when McCain took stupid cheap shots.

I'd give McCain a D-. I thought he looked wooden, rehearsed, arrogant and he was constantly on the attack. He didn't speak TO the people the way Obama can. It was like he was talking DOWN to people.

I think it's pretty clear now that Obama will win. Any objective person who pays attention to body language and listens to ideas would come to that conclusion, as far as I'm concerned.

So that's my two cents as a non-voting observer who's not trying to hide that he's supported Obama from the get-go.

Now some other points.

If you didn't see the Nashville debate, look at the images above. It was an interesting, one-on-one townhall format that says something about the dynamism of America itself and its ability to make something exciting.

Now look at the image below.

Five politicians (L-R Liberal Leader Stephane Dion, Green Party Leader Elizabeth May, New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, Progressive Conservative Leader/Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Bloc Quebecois Leader Gilles Duceppe) sitting around a table.

Yawn.

Now to be fair, and I say this proudly, Canadians probably have a worldwide image of being more global neutrals and pacifists and reasoned -- in other words, a lot more like Obama than McCain -- than Americans.

In other words, not so much flash and panache, as a nation, but more measured, maybe...more open to others' opinions, less likely to storm the bastions and invade Iraq without just cause and more likely to want everyone to sit down and talk.

And I don't say that as an insult to any individual American. Having backpacked through Europe, the Middle East, India and other places, I can vouch for it.

If you had a Canadian maple leaf sewn on your backback, you were always welcomed. Americans? Well, not so much, just because of worldwide perceptions and images.

Right or wrong, America is seen as the all-powerful invader that goes wherever it likes for its own benefit (most of the time) or at least for its allies' benefit and stomps on anything in its way. It's true.

As a Canadian who has loathed Dubya from the get-go, I see in Obama an open, intelligent, sensible saviour much like our own Liberal prime minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau of the 1960s and 1970s -- my lone Canadian political hero.

So that's a segway, of some sort, back into the Canadian election...and the nimrods we have to choose from that head five parties, only two of whom are credible and have a real chance at winning.

They are the Conservatives' Harper, a Bush clone/lapdog who has held a minority government for the past two years and who called this election, and the Liberals' Stephane Dion.

As much as I like the left-leaning Layton of the socialist NDP, the rest of Canada has never voted in his party for government. The other two are marginal.

Duceppe of the Bloc Quebecois leads a one-province party from Quebec that wants to separate from Canada. He's intelligent but he's a one-cause party. Good luck. May's Green Party wants us all to, of course, go green.

We're not ready for that.

So let's focus on Harper and Dion. Dion, first of all, is from Quebec. He has a very heavy French accent and is hard for the rest of us understand.

He looks like a bookworm, isn't very verbose and doesn't speak fluently or very well in the language that most Canadians speak. I'm sure he's super intelligent and very able. But he's not smooth in an Anglais sort of way.

However, his party is the party I have almost exclusively supported throughout my voting years. So I'm caught in a conundrum.

If I had to vote today -- and actually, hell, I'll have to vote on Tuesday -- he'd get my vote.

He'd better be praying that millions of Canadians feel the same way.

But Harper, the ultra-smooth, say-nothing, do-nothing doe-head from Alberta, also might want to start praying.

This guy ran for the leadership of the right-wing Reform Party several years ago, and lost. So he ran away crying and became the head guy at a right-wing think-tank in Calgary.

The Reform Party, because of its ultra right-wing views, could never get elected east of Alberta.

So they quietly died and the Conservatives, who had been banished to the political wilderness, absorbed them all, including Harper. When the Liberals got involved in a messy political scandal, the Conservatives re-emerged.

Guess who was leading them? Harper. With the Liberals in complete disarray, they won a minority government and have been lame ducks ever since.

Harper called this election and here we are, voting before the Americans do.

And basically, we have to choose between a doofus conservative who hasn't a clue and a francophone scholar who can't communicate with the majority of the Canadian electorate.

Why, I ask, does Harper need six Canadian flags behind him? Wouldn't one do? Or is this an inferiority complex showing through?

Or is he just trying to outdo his political hero, Dubya?

My biggest wish -- for America and for Canada -- is that we end up with two governments, come the end of November, that are middle of the road, sensible, feeling, sensitive, reasoned and calm.

Which is anything BUT what we've had for past eight years in America and the past two years or so in Canada.

Dinosaurs and (I'M A) Dunderhead

I want a new dinosaur named after ME.

http://www.physorg.com/news142157069.html

WHAT DINOSAUR WOULD YOU BE?

Eds note: I obliterated the earlier version of this post after trying several times, without success, to actually insert spaces between my paragraphs.

I think I need to take a correspondence course in computer programming or formatting.

(Actually, I'm trying out Wordpress. I'll let you know how it goes.)

Nancy -- my latest hero

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article4852384.ece

Who could deny that she's right?

Within Without and what it's all about

Nostalgia's a beautiful, enduring thing that can't change.

Deep feeling and friendships are too. Quite often, at least in my life, all those things go hand in hand.

And blogging has given me plenty of all of that since May 2006.

It's given me a chance to show myself as the total doofus I am, in a sometimes revealing if embarrassing way, and to be myself, with warts and all.

I've been feeling nostalgic for a while, actually...in fact, I always am. I'm not so much in the here and now, and I know how that's supposedly a bad thing.

I never let go of the past. And I love that I don't.

I think who you are now is a huge product of where you've been.

And so that's always with me...where I am or whatever I am.

I cherish it, I laugh over it, I cry over it, I deliberate over it.

I play songs like Photograph and In My Life and other old songs that talk about what's happened before, that resonate with me, because everyone's a product now of what their past was before.

I know it sounds so simple, but it's so true...and I'm not sure everyone follows that (for me) reality.

I'm proud of what I was before because it has made who I am now, despite all the screwups and dumb decisions I've made in a very Doh! sort of way.

And I can't let go of that, because half the time, I don't KNOW who I am now.

I'll only know who I am now at some point in the future. And it's OK if you don't get that or don't agree with it or wonder how the hell I can say that. I'm not asking for anyone's approval.

So...who gives a shit about all that?

Well, I'm sure no one gets why I called this blog Snippets from Spaceship Orion.

And they sure as hell don't know why I picked Within Without as my handle, although that has now been transformed into Winky Weinerhead, at times.

And I'm going to explain that now. Because no one in their right mind would get it. And because someone on another blog recently said something to the effect of, "WW? WTF?"

Anyone who has visited this blog before knows of my association, at least on some level, with Homo Escapeons.

AKA Donn Coppens, aka Donnnnnn, aka Lord Tennisanyone, aka a million other totally ridiculous pseudonyms he takes on on virtually a daily basis.

Fortunately for him, unfortunately for me, we live in the same town.

I consider him a lifelong friend -- not because I've known him all my life, but because from the time we met in college, he instantly became my lifelong friend.

He knows me inside and out. And I know him inside and out.

I won't bore you with all the details, some of which I've posted about before in the past two years, such as cross-country skiing in the buff in -25C temperatures at 2 a.m. in the morning.

Suffice to say that we have, and always will, spend a lot of time together.

A few years ago, in what was one stage of my transition time from broken marriage to single-again existence, when I had actually bought a house that he helped me paint...

...He came over to play pool in my basement.

In what was a perfect fit for our off-kilter but totally in-synch friendship, the pool table was irreparably lopsided. Our balls, so to speak, always rolled to one side.

As I recall, I usually beat him, mercilessly.

But as had always transpired during our only-slightly-interrupted-by-marriage-and-work 25 previous years as friends, he gave me his gift of music.

His vast knowledge, his tastes which he knew didn't necessarily jibe with mine.

Donn is a music maestro or maven, a maverick who's in the know. All through our friendship, he has ALWAYS played music he has hoped I'd like.

Sometimes I have, sometimes I haven't.

In recent years, he's made tons of CDs for me and used his artistic talents and warped humour to illustrate them with his own covers that often were intended to embarrass me, or at least to show what was going on with him or me or us both.

See how he picked my worst possible photo below right and his best to make me look bad? (Just FYI, the pic of me was taken AFTER he insisted he and I get haircuts to look like goofy RCMP guys).





And to this day, he still does that.

Music is very much a unifying force between us, even despite his stinging criticisms of me when I don't like what he likes -- or when I go crazy over a song he DOESN'T like.

We used to play Stayin' Alive by the Bee Gees and do air guitar and air drums to it and do the whole John Travolta thing, laughin' the night away as we sipped on rye and Pepsi or rum and Pepsi or beers.

Or as we played Blackjack or Phase 10, which we still do.

I must confess, he usually beats me at those girly games. (Runs away laughing). But his lovely wife, Alice, usually beats the pants off us both.

Still, she gives me big close hugs, so I don't care...

Anyway, on one of those nights several years ago, when we were downstairs in my house blasting the music away -- I think it was the night he accidentally destroyed one of my speakers with his pool cue -- he put on some music I hadn't heard before.

He pulled out an album -- and I mean, an album, a black vinyl record, I believe -- by a group I had heard of before but had paid no attention to: The Ozark Mountain Daredevils.

I was blown away.

One of their songs was Spaceship Orion. Another was called Within Without.

Both spectacular songs with tons of acoustic guitar, which he knows I like. I believe he had just started blogging (in 2005, I think).

He was trying to get me to start blogging. I did, in 2006.

And I dubbed my blog Snippets from Spaceship Orion. And for my handle, I picked Within Without -- to signify my thoughts from Within being transferred Without.

That's that story.

And I'm stickin' to it.

The way I've got my blog set up, Spaceship Orion will play automatically when you click on my blog. If you want to listen to Within Without, it's at the top right side of my sidebar. Do as you will or won't.