Rap lyrics performed by aspiring hip-hop artist Anthony Spencer may have shown disrespect to gang members and led to his murder on the weekend, Toronto police say.

“Disrespect is a motive for murder. I’ve seen it before,” homicide Det. Sgt. Gary Giroux told reporters at a news conference Tuesday. “If you look at Mr. Spencer’s music, it may have directly or indirectly have offended some gang members in the area. “

Those slights, he added, might not mean something to the general community, but they are significant to the gang culture.

It began as most brilliant ideas do: With beer.

Sitting around shooting the shit (with a registered weapon, naturally - this IS Canada, after all) on New Year’s Eve, we got to talking about my greatest love. My church, my home, my sanctuary - my nightmare. It too was a brilliant idea born of beer.

My whole life it had been my lover, parent, child, twin and temple. Then it

As it once was, my temple

was gone. Just ruins, which I excavated with care and store in a sarcophagus. Its demise haunts my darkest dreams. In life it was my safest place - in death my greatest demon. It was the one thing I hadn’t overcome, in a lifetime of overcoming the kind of fear and darkness a greater man would be proud to have done.

As we chatted over the foamy ale, my adventurous friend said, “Fine. We’ll go in the morning.”

Pfft. In his cups (not everyone can handle their liquor as well as the hard-drinking RightGirl), I merely smiled and nodded. Yeah, whatever. I hadn’t set foot back on holy ground since July 2004. I wasn’t about to do it the first day of the new year, with beer farts and a headache.

Alas, the crazy motherfucker was not kidding. The next morning, the first day of 2012, we hit the road to face a dragon. A really big, really depressing dragon.

As an aside, my friend has the world’s smallest bladder, so a trip that should have taken six hours took nine. Jesus.

Anyway, we were off, with me at the helm of the Dragon Slayer, as I’ve come to call his vehicle. I tend to be a bit more insistent with the gas pedal than he, and have way more snow miles under my belt (not a euphemism).

As we got closer to our destination - a place I have not taken many mortals in the past - I began to grow nervous. My breath became shallow and my pupils expanded and contracted rapidly, making the bright headlights on the dark backroads quite perilous. Only focusing on a brutal whiteout at a particularly rough patch of road kept me from having a full on panic attack. My friend suggests I caused the inclement weather, and under the circumstances, I really don’t disagree.

Finally we rounded the bend to where the greatest love of my life once stood, a living thing, breathing, until the fire consumed it. But the road was slippery, and I wouldn’t stop the car until we could safely park. I barely glanced out the side window at the new monument that now stood. My goal was the driveway of the house at the top of the hill.

“Someone is waiting for you,” he said, and as I aimed for the driveway, I saw that Mr G (my father’s best friend and my best friend’s father, all conveniently rolled into one) was out with his dog. The snow stopped as I glided the Dragon Slayer into the driveway.

I hopped out into the cool night, and Mr G’s face looked as if he’d seen a ghost. I suppose he had. After all, this was a ghost-hunting mission, was it not? And if my father’s ghost walks at all, it walks in my body, and in my face.

“You said you’d never come back,” Mr G breathed as I approached him.

“Well then, it’s a fucking Christmas miracle, isn’t it?”

We embraced, and he ushered us into his home, staying outside with his gigantic hound. The smell hit me, and I began to fall apart. That smell. The wood and carpet, the doggy scent and the G-family smell… These were the last people left alive who knew what it looked like when my smile reached my eyes. And they hadn’t seen it reach since I was seven years old. Once Daddy sold the house, my eyes died. Here were the only living witnesses that I had once been a happy child. This house - their house - had seen me happy, too.

I greeted and embraced the ageless Mrs G, who had not changed in the half decade plus since I had seen her at her mother-in-law’s funeral. Mr G and the uber-beast returned, and we all made pleasant small talk until my companion reminded me that, “We came here to do something, so put your coat on and let’s get it done.”

Several deep breaths and some panicked tears later, my coat and boots were back on and we headed out into the pristine snow. The hill was steep, and my companion lent me his arm as I navigated in my heeled city boots. Even at the height of great anxiety and crisis, I was stylish. Heh. After all, one can’t slay a dragon in any old thing. Remember Thatcher’s Birkin bags? My point exactly.

I had stopped pretending that I had any control over my emotions. I wept openly as we reached the bottom of the hill and I looked upon the new house. Inside was a happy family, backlit by a Christmas tree and a fireplace. They were innocent. It wasn’t their carelessness that led to the demise of the only thing I ever truly believed in; they had bought the property after the house was gone. Innocent.

The new house was bigger, necessitating carving out a section of the jutting bit of mountain in front in order to accommodate it. But my god - my one true god - it was breathtaking. It was good. It was, as I described it, “the most beautiful tombstone I have ever seen.”

And with that, a dragon was slain. I knew from the G’s that the family had a little girl who - when they bought the property - was about the age I had been when Daddy broke my heart. And here she was, the replacement child, coming of age in a way that I hadn’t been able to, surrounded by walls of love her parents built for her.

She had my blessing. The beautiful monument had my blessing.

We spent the night in the city. Though hospitality was offered in the woods, I wasn’t ready for that - yet. That day will come, no doubt, but after slaying a dragon, I needed a little distance.

I will return. I will go back to the people who remember my smiling eyes, to the house whose smell I grew up in, and to the woods that still hold all my secrets and sooth.

I killed a dragon. If I do nothing else this year, this decade, this lifetime, at least I killed a dragon.

Ladies’ rooms, childrens’ changing rooms… it’s never a good idea.

Toronto police are investigating reports of a male intruder in some women’s washrooms at York University.

Police say two women went into a washroom at Curtis Lecture Halls around 6 p.m. Tuesday and saw a man in a stall beside them.

They then saw the man reach under the stall holding a cellphone in his hand.

If you ever see anyone, ever, in a public bathroom (or any bathroom except theirs at home) with a camera or recording device, call the cops.

Chances are it’s a rapist, voyeur, or in the case of a school or other childrens’ restroom, a pedophile.

…I was a little girl in elementary school. I didn’t understand much about race, nor politics, nor the ways of the world. I was in first grade.

Our class was overcrowded. Our teacher was awesome though; very animated when going through our class reader. She made it fun to learn.

Because I had a stay-at-home mom who spent a lot of time reading to/with me, I was ahead of the learning curve, burning through the Dick & Jane books at a rapid clip and eventually being given third grade books just to shut me up.

One day after school I came home frustrated and threw my Mickey Mouse briefcase onto the couch. Dad asked me what was wrong.

“None of the kids can read in my class!”

He pointed out that we were 6 years old - it was going to take time.

“No, I mean, they don’t speak english, so they can’t read! It takes for-ev-er for them to read one line!”

Much of what I was saying was punctuated with a great deal of eye-rolling.

I knew, at the tender age of six, that some of us were being held back from our potential while the ESL-ers struggled to come to grips with the language. Ok, I was doing fine on my own, but there were kids in my class - english-speaking kids - who struggled with dyslexia, dysgraphia, shyness, etc, and the fact that Mrs C had to slow us all down and spend precious time on the ESL-ers meant that those other kids got shortchanged.

And it meant that the advanced kids got completely screwed. Eventually three of us were moved out of reading hour entirely and sent to Mrs B’s art class to while the time away, lest we become disruptive.

The point I’m trying to make, from the perspective of my six year old self, is that stories like this aren’t a surprise. Endless streams of immigrant kids come to the West and don’t learn even the basics of the language before they start school. Their parents can’t be arsed to speak english at home, leaving the kids at a huge disadvantage, and leading to the developmental delay of countless other children they come into contact with.

It’s easy to get all warm and squishy about multiculturalism - for which mine was the first generation immersed in it in Canada - but be selfish for a second and think of your own kid. Do you want him/her to learn to read and write? Do you want him/her to have a chance to succeed? Do you want them to have the opportunity to excel and learn to play to their strengths?

You are NOT a bad person for wanting these things! The truly bad people want everyone to stew in mediocrity.

Multiculti isn’t going to go away any time soon. No western government is suddenly going to make it mandatory for kids to learn English before they start primary school - so much simpler to leave that burden on the Kindergarten/first grade teacher. So I plead with parents to come home from work early (or better yet, have one of you stay home with the kids), turn off the TV, put down your iPhone, and teach your kids to read! Because sadly, they won’t learn in school.

Even a clever six year old knows that.

Canada tops the list of countries with inflammatory bowel disease.

D’uh.

Up until last year, the food pyramid was sucking the dick of grain farmers, and had been for almost a century. For fuck sake, feeding a cow a steady diet of corn causes its guts to ulcer, leading to the need for all those pesky antibiotics in our food. Works the same for us humans.

Add to that the fact that Canada has a fucking WHEAT BOARD - basically, a non-government body telling the government what people should be eating, and having the government enforce it for them - and I’m surprised nobody made the correlation sooner.

Look, I’m not telling you to go all Ezekiel bread and gluten free. I’m just saying have a bit of common sense and trust your gut when it comes to feeding yourself and your family.

As someone who regularly shags married men - married is my favorite flavor, actually - I am throwing my completely irrelevant political weight behind Newt Gingrich.

Why, you ask?

He’s smarter than everyone else combined. Sure he’s establishment - meaning he had rarely held a job outside of politics. So was Obama. If we’re voting for establishment candidates, I would prefer someone who has actually been around the block a few times and voted more than just “present.”

I am well aware that Newt’s past may catch up to him. We all have a past, and it eventually catches up to us. But how we handle it is what counts.

Go Newt.

I’ve been happily tucked up in farm country, trying to keep Bug and I warm in a 130 year old farmhouse. It’s 16 Deg F right now, so I’m tucked up in the narrow wooden bed with Bug, passing the time with a few thick novels that I picked up before Christmas.

Let the Great World Spin: A Novel is billed as a 9/11 allegory. A tightrope walker sets up a wire between the World Trade Towers in 1974, before they were even complete. As his story plays out above the city, others are playing out below. An Irish missionary. Bronx prostitutes. Grieving mothers who lost their sons to Vietnam. I tore through it in two days. It’s so well written, you’ll be able to actually see the characters moving before you.

I also picked up The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Help Deluxe Edition because I’ve been remiss in not reading them. Starting Dragon Tattoo this evening.

Did Santa leave any books under your tree?

Some years back, I wrote a very, very controversial post about Canada’s Native communities. I referred to incest and sexual abuse of Native children, and I was ripped to shreds by the left, the apologists and by some Natives (the only ones I really cared to hear from on the subject). Vilified. Belittled. Hated.

But I wasn’t wrong.

According to some estimates, the level of abuse in aboriginal communities is staggering.

“Sexual violence and sexual abuse in Aboriginal communities affect 75 to 80 per cent of our girls and women,” said social worker Sylvia Maracle, from the Ontario Federation of Friendship Centres.

Among non-aboriginal girls and women the rate is closer to 20 per cent.

You can hate me all you want. You can rail at me, and even blame me for the problem. Or, instead, you can call it what it is and start addressing it at the source.

I didn’t molest and rape Native children. Other Natives did that. But I’m just that much easier to hate, aren’t I?

Big stuff is happening! Big, huge!

But in the meantime, entertain yourselves with this week’s Brass Balls Radio, Horsemeat of the Apocalypse Edition.

Horsemeat, illegal immigration, and parental rights and responsibilities. Kim goes shopping in Dallas.

Brass Balls Radio – Show 114

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When I’m able to fill you in on the BIG HUGE AWESOME stuff happening, I will.

The recipe for my famous chili chocolate chip cookies!

Chili Chocolate Chip Cookies
1 1/2 cups semisweet chocolate chips
1/4 cup butter or margarine
3/4 granulated sugar
1 egg, slightly beaten
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp baking powder
3/4 tsp cayenne pepper

Melt 1 cup of the chocolate chips in a double boiler and set aside.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees and lightly grease a cookie sheet.
In a large bowl, cream together butter & sugar. Slightly beat egg and add to butter mixture, along with vanilla. Stir in melted chocolate.
Combine flour, salt, cinnamon, cayenne and baking powder in a separate bowl. Slowly add to butter mixture, mixing well with each addition.
Stir in remaining chocolate chips.
Bake 8-10 minutes, taking care not to burn (chocolate scorches easily).

After mixing the dough, let it set for a while. The melted chocolate can make it runny. Same goes for the baked cookies - let them set on the tray for a bit. The dough makes about 24 cookies.

I opened the mailbox today to find a bulky envelope from New Hampshire. You know what that means? It’s Christmas time again!

Every year around Christmas I get a new Mark Steyn Christmas album to help make the season jolly, and he didn’t disappoint me this year, unlike that Santa fellow who has been letting me down ever since the famed pony incident of 1980.

Making Spirits Bright will be on my CD player this weekend while I trim the tree. Thanks Mark!

I’m a big fan of scary personal trainer Jillian Michaels, of Biggest Loser fame, which is why I got her book Unlimited: How to Build an Exceptional Life.

I will admit that I was really frustrated in the first chapter or so, when it read just like that epic piece of drivel from a few years back, The Secret. Alas, due to my hero worship, I soldiered on and was glad. The chapter on forgiving yourself and others… Wow.

I’m not really capable of forgiving. I understand the theory behind it, but the mechanics of it escape me. So her chapter on it really resonated.

The book itself is about getting over your shit and empowering yourself to do better in life. But thankfully, it’s nothing like The Secret - you don’t just wish things into being. It always amazed me just how many lefty anti-god types swallowed The Secret, but would never be caught dead praying.

So here’s what I’m manifesting from Unlimited: I’m putting up links to my Amazon account here in this post, helping my readers to log on and do their Christmas shopping. In return, Amazon will thank me with gift cards for books that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford. It’s a win-win!

Unlimited: How to Build an Exceptional Life

Exploited children from Penn State to Ohio, Wendy and Kimberly talk about subject matter that affects everyone and why if you see something you should say something.

Brass Balls Radio – Show 112

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My charming Southern Belle co-host gives me what-for

Herman Cain’s latest public outing, student loans for fine arts, southern gentility, and why Unions are just not polite.

Brass Balls Radio – Show 111

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Occupy Boston and all the starving people, what’s up with Uganda, child trafficking, and of course, chickens.

Brass Balls Radio – Show 108

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This Air Canada kerfuffle is getting out of hand.

Here’s the scoop: The flight attendants are whining about… well, who the fuck cares, really? Air Canada is telling them to get stuffed, naturally. And the government is getting involved in the negotiations because… This is the part where Dawg and I become bedfellows.

Air Canada became private in 1988. And, it is no longer the only airline flying in and out of our vast country. We have Porter, WestJet, and a host of regionals. Therefore, the government has no claim that Air Canada needs to operate in order to avoid negatively affecting our economy. We have choice, and for years consumers have been expressing that choice by going to WestJet. Therefore, if Air Canada and its unions want to destroy themselves, they too should have the choice to do so.

We may be on different sides of the argument, but Dawg and I fundamentally agree that the Labour Minister, Lisa Raitt, has no place at the table. The government should butt out and let the airline and its spoiled unions destroy each other. It’s evolution, baby.

From Landmark Report:

Speaking on the condition of anonymity, a member of the College’s search committee revealed the appointment to be Dr. Ingrid Mattson, a convert to Islam who is presently a Professor of Islamic Studies at Hartford Seminary in Connecticut, and Director of the MacDonald Center for the Study of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations.

The presence of a white, female, English-speaking, convert to Islam in such a leadership role for North American Muslims may seem like the community’s embrace of progressiveness, but Mattson is far from being a moderate.

In 2001, Mattson claimed that Wahhabism–Saudi-sponsored terrorism that was in play during the September 11 attacks–was “analogous to the European protestant reformation“. She denounced it had any role in 9/11, which has been disproven.

Go. Click. Read. And most of all - SEND HELP!

Toronto tries hard. It has diverse colors and cultures existing side-by-side. It has one of the largest Gay Pride weekends in the world. It is very laissez-faire about everything.

But when it tries to accommodate the Comic Book Death Cult of Islam, things get hairy.

Four of the six speakers scheduled to appear at an upcoming Muslim conference at a downtown hotel have made anti-gay or anti-Semitic remarks.

The “Calling the World Back to Allah” conference is part of the “Canada Launch Tour” of the Islamic Education and Research Academy (IERA), a British organization seeking to establish a presence in Toronto and Montreal.

The conference is scheduled for Oct. 23 at the Sheraton Centre. Gay activists in Britain denounced a hotel chain in January for hosting a London IERA event involving several of the same speakers.

One of the speakers expected in Toronto, Malaysian convert Hussain Yee, has said “the Jews” are “the most extremist nation in this world.” He also suggested that Jews perpetrated and celebrated the 9/11 attacks.

Hamza Andreas Tzortzis, a British convert, has argued that open displays of homosexuality should be made a crime.

British convert Abdur Raheem Green, who also appeared at a July conference in Toronto, has written that gays, like adulterers, should be stoned to death. At the July conference, Green criticized the media for labeling him hateful and challenged critics to “find a pattern” of homophobia in his hundreds of public statements. “All you can find is one comment I made on my blog where I talked about Islamic law and punishment for homosexuals,” he said.

It’s not that Toronto doesn’t try to promote equality. It’s that Islam exists beyond the boundaries of societal norms and common sense.

Hatred of Jews is a major part of Islam. As a religion of conquest, converting, enslaving and killing the Jews of the Middle East is how it obtained a stronghold. And like most religions, it finds homosexuality to be an abomination (it is biologically useless), and therefore homosexuals should be disposed of. However, unlike Christian fundamentalists, Muslims don’t stand around with picket signs saying “God Hates Fags.” Islamic countries routinely murder homosexuals.

Poor Toronto, stuck in its own equality trap, trying to find common ground between friendly, law-abiding Jews and homosexuals, while also trying to make cultists feel welcome. Doomed to fail, and eventually there will be bloodshed.

Everyone knows the famous story of Michael Jackson’s fake skin condition that turned him and his sisters white.

Seems it’s Standard Operating Procedure in the black community, which appears to hate blacks way more than any cracker could.

He [Vybz Kartel, some Jamaican wanted for murder - though that's somewhat redundant] originally claimed to use cake soap - a clothes-bleaching product - to lighten his skin, so that it was easier to see his tattoos.

But after the Jamaican manufacturer of the product, Blue Power Group, refuted his claims, Kartel explained that he actually used his own special concoction.

Soon his secret recipe will be available to buy.

Skin whitening has been a controversial - and very worrying - trend among women for decades. It has become so commonplace that some cosmetics firms have been accused of making their Indian and black models look paler in their campaigns.

I live in the ghetto - I see it every day. There are no less than NINE wig shops within a two-mile stretch here, so that black women can wear the hair of white and Asian women. I see the black guys going after light and white women - I am particularly in the crosshairs, as I have a huge ass, a desirable quality to a black man.

There’s a cry to put racism behind us, to have equal respect for blacks as for white. To which I say: YOU FIRST. When you love and respect yourselves equally, get back to me.

Perhaps “holocaust” isn’t the best word to use on Yom Kippur, and I do apologize, but nothing else fit as well.

I don’t go home - home being Montreal - if I can help it. Home to me is death. Home is heartbreak, broken relationships, old hurts and the deaths of my parents. I went back in 2007 for less than 24 hours, and it was enough. It was more death. But it was easier than the one I dealt with when I went back in 04.

Today I got a facebook message. Another one down. I called the family in question - the same family as the link above from 2007 - to pay my respects. Instead of the usual platitudinal to-and-fro, I instead received a litany of deaths and cancers for the past 12 months.

I’m stupefied. I can barely breathe. My “home” is more a place of death than ever. And just when I was about to slip in to take care of some overdue business, then slip out again, a grieving ninja.

I can’t go back. I just can’t.

There once were three little drunks/pigs. Those three little drunks worked together to build a house of gasoline, a house of stucco, and a gorgeous L.A. beach house of bleached pine.

The one who built the house of gasoline died in 1995 - his house burned to the ground in 2004 and took my soul with it.

The one who built the house of stucco died 2 weeks ago, and I just found out.

The one whose house was made of bleached pine and a dream - he lives today despite surviving lung cancer and his wife’s recent battle with breast cancer. You cannot blow down the beach house of pine.

I am barely breathing, trying to absorb all this death and disease. There is no amount of vodka, no amount of valium in this world, that will make it all ok. My childhood is not only gone - it has died.