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.

Given my upbringing by the Quebec head of the IAMAW, I can’t say I’m overly fond of Air Canada.

But putting that aside, I do pity the poor bastards who are trying to walk the delicate line between safety and politics. Don’t they know that political correctness always trumps personal safety?

Over a decade ago I visited Winnipeg. Borrowing my host’s truck for a meander, I took a wrong turn and wound up in what appeared to be a Mexican shantytown, replete with lean-tos and outhouses, on a dirt road. I told my host about it later, and he not only gave me the height of shit, he forbade me from taking the truck again.

Injuns.

You know: Those people who hold an eternal grievance and refuse to do for themselves, and therefore overstretch available resources from the teat, finding them obviously lacking.

So now poor Air Canada has made the mistake of admitting their staff don’t feel safe in Injun-controlled parts of the ‘Peg, and want them moved elsewhere. Fools. Better to let your staff be killed by Canada’s poor Noble Savages than to protect them and look “raaaaacist.”

And by racist, I mean sane.

In a bulletin issued late last month, Air Canada informed its pilots and flight crew personnel that they would no longer be staying at the Radisson Hotel on Portage Avenue and Smith Street because of “questionable safety in the area.”

The airline’s decision has riled various Manitoba leaders, including Winnipeg Mayor Sam Katz, who is demanding to know why Air Canada believes the city’s downtown is too dangerous for its crews during overnight layovers.

I understand that it’s the Mayor’s job to defend his city. I don’t begrudge him that. But common sense and personal safety come before sacred cows. Or squaws. Or whatever.

According to Stats Can (most recent stats I could find were 2010), the places with the highest crime are

NWT & Nunavut (both twice as high as other provinces), followed by Saskatchewan and Manitoba. It’s clear what the Northwest Territories and Nunavut have in common, but for my American readers, Sask & Man are much the same.  Full of indigent and indolent Natives with no desire to jump on the Western job boom. And frankly, why should they? With the government paying for their liquor, there’s no incentive to work.

Canadian gift shops are jammed with bad native art, for which the government pays handsomely out of some sense of perceived guilt, and which wealthy elitists buy for the same reason. It’s pretty ugly, but it’s the most visible way which we are accommodating Native mediocrity in Canada. There are many others which our visitors aren’t privy to.

Down in the U.S., there’s a frustration with reparations, which after 160 years are pretty much invalid. There are no survivors of slavery, and all that’s left is a giant welfare system that perpetuates aggrieved black poverty. Canada’s Natives are much the same. Born with a chip on their shoulders, they hold their hands out until white liberal guilt kicks in and someone hands them that which is worked for by others.

Isn’t it time we quit giving into the game, gave up the racism of low expectations, and actually demanded something from our natives?

This week Wendy interviews Brad Ross of the T.T.C., Kimberly’s cat “steps on it”, Troy Davis, child rapists, and waivers for “No Child Left Behind.”

Brass Balls Radio – Show 105

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I have a September 11th playlist on my iPod. It includes the usual: God Bless the USA by Lee Greenwood and the USMC Band doing Amazing Grace.

But there are a few tunes that are a little harder to come by, and I share them here for your downloading pleasure. RIGHT CLICK TO DOWNLOAD.

The Cure - Killing An Arab

Def Leppard - Gods of War 9/11 Remix

Metallica - Seek and Destroy 9/11 Remix

The number one thing any health and hospital organization can do to prevent the spread of infection is to hire top-notch cleaning staff. Alas, that would be too easy. For the price of 3-4 housekeeping staff, the Niagara Region - devastated by a runaway outbreak of C. Difficile - is hiring a … supervisor.

The troubled Niagara Health System will be getting a provincial supervisor to oversee its affairs.

Health Minister Deb Matthews made the announcement late Monday that steps are being taken in order to restore public confidence in the hospital system that has been plagued with merger issues and a deadly C.difficile outbreak.

The NHS serves 434,000 people in the Niagara area and is comprised of six hospital sites including those in Niagara Falls, St. Catharines, Fort Erie and Welland.

Matthews said she understands everyone in Niagara was doing their best but in order for the hospital to move forward, a change is needed.

“I can’t ignore the fact that a very large segment of the public has lost necessary confidence in this hospital’s administration,” she said. “To make sure that NHS is on the right track, I think it’s important that there is a leader within the hospital system who reports directly to me.”

Do you know how much Clorox you can buy for the price of a government appointee? Unless this supervisor plans on donning rubber gloves and cleaning toilets in the affected hospitals, I see no benefit to this.

I spent most of yesterday in the airless and sweltering Toronto Underground Cinema with Kevin Smith, where the two of us sweated down a size. He was in town to screen his horror pic Red State to an adoring audience in a city that always sells out for him.

I noticed, not for the first time, that the machinations of a press conference are often just as interesting as the main event, but I shall hold off for today and merely direct you to Landmark Report, where I tell the tale of Kevin Smith and his penultimate movie.

Go read my profile on Kevin Smith and Red State.

One of the things that has been on my mind leading up to this Memorial Day has been the prevalence of PTSD - post Traumatic Stress Disorder. So many of our men coming home from the wars are leaving their minds behind - nightmares, flashbacks, depression and more. This is something I’ve had the misfortune to see firsthand, though on a minor level. Despite what the TV shows tell you, PTSD doesn’t generally manifest in shooting sprees… it’s more insidious than that. It’s a personality shift in your husband or son, a withdrawing from loved ones, a cry in the night.

I’ve never been to war. I’ve only ever seen the after effects. However, there are many civilians who have been struck with PTSD from the events of September 11, 2001. Nightmares, phobias, paranoia, uncontrolled anger issues. Check, check, check, check.

We are fighting a Global War on Terror on two official fronts because of the events that took place that day, and the men (and women) who serve are out there risking their lives and their minds to help alleviate the nightmares we at home have endured since that day.

I myself will never forget the events of that day, and I include them here for you. But I must say, since the death of bin Laden - even though he was merely a bogeyman - I sleep a little easier at night. So thank you to all those who serve now, and who have served before, for taking away my bad dreams and making them your own. Your sacrifice is not unappreciated.

It was still summer. My future husband was still shacked up with me in my trendy east end apartment in Montreal. He had the summer off to be a tourist, and I had quit my job a month earlier with the Montreal satellite office of Manhattan-based Everlast Apparel. My plan was to chill out in my city before moving across an ocean to be with the aforementioned character, Andy.

Through the haze of sleep, Andy was able to hear the ringing phone which was too low to penetrate my day-glo orange earplugs. He staggered out of the bed and followed the phone cord out of the bedroom, down the hall and through the kitchen to the sun room, where the phone rested on the couch. The call had gone to voicemail. It was early - too early for any of our friends. Andy checked the message, figuring it might be his parents calling from overseas.

The call changed everything.

“I hope when you were in New York two weeks ago you saw the World Trade Center, cause it just fucking blew up!” shrieked my best friend Heather into my answering service.

Andy was confused, and called her back.

He came into the bedroom after hanging up the call. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he touched my shoulder and said, “Heather called. America is at war, but they don’t know who with. The Twin Towers are gone. We have to go to Heather’s.”

I opened one eye, reached up and pulled out one ear plug. “Wwhhat?”

“Just get dressed. We’re going to Heather’s.”

I pulled my hair back in a ponytail, put on my black sun dress - no panties, slid on my sandals, and we walked through eerily quiet streets to Heather’s apartment three blocks away. The sky was this shade of blue that I’ll never forget - September 11th Blue. To this day, whenever I see it, I have to turn away from the brilliance of it.

Heather opened her apartment door like an undertaker ushering us in to send off our dearly departed. She took my hand and led me to the living room, where the glowing TV gave off an image I could NOT comprehend. The planes flew, and the towers fell, over and over again. It was 10:30am. I began to laugh. A high pitched, semi-hysterical, is-the-joke-on-me? kind of laugh.

“Tea.” she said.

She and I went into the kitchen to boil water, leaving Andy to stare wordlessly at the screen.

We boiled the water. We steeped the tea. I picked up two cups - one each for me and Andy - and splashed hot water on my hand. I screamed. The tiny splash didn’t warrant the scream that came from my mouth. I just screamed and screamed, unable to stop. No one moved to comfort me. We were all broken.

“Shawn has all the US cable channels. We’ll grab a cab to his place.” Shawn was Heather’s finace, an out of work CBC reporter on the busiest news day of our lifetimes.

“No,” I said, “we’ll wait till noon. That’s four planes already. We don’t know what will happen when Los Angeles opens.”

We waited. I can’t remember if we said much, or what we would have said.

At 12:30, with all flights around North America locked down, we hailed a taxi to go over the Mont Royal to Shawn’s.

There we were met by two more out-of-work reporters. Shawn’s friends. I went into the kitchen to rustle up some nourishment, and found only tomato juice and vodka. It was a Bloody Mary day.

Over and over we watched the towers fall. We watched Peter Jennings go from unshaven with no makeup to put-together to tired over the course of the day. We flipped channels, until we came to the colored test pattern of a NYC station whose antenna was atop one of the towers. Suddenly it was real.

That night, taking the Metro home from Shawn’s, I grabbed a discarded Gazette. The front page showed the devastation, and for the first time I saw the shorthand: 9/11. It took me a moment to place the confusion: Never in my lifetime had the Montreal Gazette printed an afternoon edition.

This was serious.

The next day, the four of us - me, Heather, Andy and Shawn - all stood outside the collection office of Hema Quebec, the blood agency. For five hours we stood in line with other good samaritans, not knowing yet - we wouldn’t know for several days - that there were no survivors who would need the blood we were offering up.

I’ve lost 30lbs since Christmas, but it’s nowhere near enough to put me in shorts without frightening the local children.

So I dug this excellent diet back out of mothballs. I was doing this last year until I realized I couldn’t afford healthy food (you may want to listen to this week’s Brass Balls Radio for a good rant about the price of arugula at Whole Foods, ahem…), then shoved it in a virtual drawer and forgot about it.

But now that the sun is shining and my fridge is stocked, I decided it’s time to get serious. I’m currently losing about half a pound to 1.5 lbs per week. I want to bring that up to about 3 lbs per week.

Before it’s time to squeeze into a bathing suit, feel free to follow along with me.

Every day is a new horror in Canadian socialist health care.

A couple of weeks ago it was emergency patients being triaged in a Tim Horton’s donut shop*. This week it’s an Ontario man who became ill while vacationing in Mexico, and was left there to rot because Ontario had no available hospital beds for him.

Clayton Leveille, 21, became seriously ill while on vacation with his girlfriend last July. He had medical insurance, but waited seven weeks to be taken home because there were no hospital beds available in his hometown of St. Catharines, his mother said.

After three weeks in a Mexico hospital, Leveille was taken to a hospital in Florida where he was treated for four weeks. He was finally brought home and treated, but died in January, said Laurie Leveille.

The extra sauce of insult on this hard-to-swallow death is that it’s the New Democratic Party (aka the far-left socialists) who are moaning about the lack of hospital beds. Of course, were it not for the disaster of the Canada Health Act as created by NDP-er Tommy Douglas and consistently upheld by those who followed in his goosesteps, this boy would have been treated in a Canadian hospital and may have lived.

To have Andrea Horwath or any other socialist lay this at the feet of anyone but themselves is disingenuous at best, and an insult to the dead kid at worst.

*A friend of mine is having her infant son treated in St Tim’s over in Vancouver. He’s 16 months old, and suffers from terrible seizures. Yesterday he almost died - again. She is currently fighting with the province of British Colombia to send her son down to Seattle for the necessary genetic testing he requires, but the province is balking at the cost.

Our lives mean nothing here.

Let the grieving end. After a long 15 months with no Brass Balls Radio, a long conversation between myself and producer Mike Williams took place today. BBR is returning to webwaves!

Not only will Brass Balls Radio be coming back for download on Monday, March 28, but we have an even bigger announcement:

Brass Balls Idol

Fact is, ol’ Mike never much cared for being a host. So I need a sidekick, someone who can hold his own with an attention-whore like me. I need a preferably male non-Canadian (the Take That Media network already has more Canadian Content than is required by law).

If you think you have what it takes to be charming and amusing, send me a 90 second recorded clip of you reading a headline and opining.

Send it to rightgirl AT gmail DOT com. Doesn’t have to be polished, just has to be good. If you capture my interest, I’ll invite you to co-host with me for one show. If you capture the audience’s interest, you win the coveted sidekick slot. If you can charm the panties off me and make me laugh, I’ll likely sleep with you.

Again, that’s a 90-second clip of you being fabulous. If you’ve got Brass Balls, you are HIRED. If you don’t, you get voted off.

…just to have the chance to shoot him myself.

This morning, coming off the subway, a busker was playing and singing Imagine. Seriously? How much more of a cliché can you get? I really don’t need communism before my morning coffee. So here’s a roundup of shit we can do without.

If you don’t lift your feet when you walk, I should be allowed to shoot your kneecaps off. It’s not like you’re using the knees God gave you anyway.

Libertarians don’t belong anywhere. They are miserable, contradictory and generally selfish people. FFS, they make ME look generous and community minded!

When eco-freakiness turns around and bites itself in the ass. I’m really sorry to hear about the whales, but it might be a good way to teach the left-wing bleeding hearts that there are always unintended consequences, and they should think with their heads and not their hearts.

I like this idea. If we push the gay agenda in citizenship classes and exams, we can weed out the honor-killers in our midst.

At a time when the rest of us are battening down to survive the balance of the recession, Scottish taxpayers are teaching kids a natural biological function. What’s next? Shitting?

And finally, not for the squeamish or faint of heart. Images of the pain that Muslims inflict. Crime scene photos of the innocent Fogel family, murdered in their sleep for the crime of being Jews, while Palestinians handed out candy to celebrate - the same way they did on 9/11.

It was about 10 days before Christmas, and I get an email from a dude with a very Arabic sounding name, asking me for my home address. Whatnow? Um…

He was from Ogilvy, the ginormous marketing company, and wanted to send me a Tassimo coffee maker. You know the ones with the cute ads featuring human bar codes? Yeah, one of those. But with the death threats and all, I nearly hit delete. Instead I went to twitter, the oracle of all knowledge, and checked that this dude was legit. Boy, is he ever! I was getting tweets from dozens of people, including YummyMummy Erica Ehm, about the veracity of my new coffee pusher. So I gave him the deets and waited for my Tassimo.

Sadly, because I live in a den of despair in da hood, UPS was a no-go. I finally had Duri (the gent in question) send it off to my office, where the overwhelming consensus was “Keep it here! We want it!”

The moral of this story? There’s more than one.

1. Bloggers get free shit all the time.

2. Duri isn’t a terrorist and isn’t going to murder me. Thanks for the coffee, dude!

3. Coffee = goooooood!

You can check out the Tassimo coffee system yourself at Tassimo.com or order one directly from Amazon. If you order via Amazon, I get more free stuff, so thanks!

President Obama thinks it’s peachy that Michael vick was so warmly welcomed back into the NFL after torturing and killing dogs.

Tucker Carlson thinks Vick should have been “executed” for his crime.

They’re both idiots.

By embracing Vick back into the fold, the NFL has sent a message that so long as you are talented at your sport, rules do not apply to you. Kind of like the way Hollywood fêtes Roman Polanski, despite his admission of child rape. And the President of the United States is all warm and fuzzy about it. That’s not acceptable. Vick’s experience has shown that there’s little to no repercussion for doing what he did, and the President is validating that perception.

Carlson, on the other hand, is calling for the death of Michael Vick for killing dogs. Dogs. Please try to keep that in perspective, when we consider how many (black) sports stars have been on trial for rapes and even murders, with no consequence whatsoever. It breaks my heart that someone was engaged in dog fighting to the detriment of innocent animals, but a human life is worth more, and if it’s ok for sports stars to rape their groupies and murder their ex-wives, then in theory it’s perfectly fine to kill a few dogs.

The President, Tucker Carlson and all of America need to get their priorities straight over this.

Muslims, on the other hand, aren’t so friendly about your religion or mine.

Fanatics from a banned Islamic hate group [count up the redundancies in that phrase... - ed.] have launched a nationwide poster campaign denouncing Christmas as evil.

Organisers plan to put up thousands of placards around the UK claiming the season of goodwill is responsible for rape, teenage pregnancies, abortion, promiscuity, crime and paedophilia.

They hope the campaign will help ‘destroy Christmas’ in this country and lead to Britons converting to Islam instead.

In other news, Kathy has a clip up from one of my favorite movies, which the gentleman and I watched just a couple of weeks ago.

It was a year ago today. I was standing on the subway platform at Broadview Station, waiting for my gentleman friend. Our plan was to go to the theater in Yorkville to see George Clooney in Up In The Air. He would meet me on the platform at 2pm, and we would catch the next train in. The 1:58 came, and he wasn’t on it. I hoped he would be on the 2:03.

My iPod was in, listening to Christmas tunes. The Long Blonds were singing Christmas is Canceled, and it was a quiet part of the song as the lights of the train came through the tunnel into the station. I heard it more than saw it. The ear is quicker than the eye, though the brain took a moment to process the thud. It wasn’t until I heard the shrieks and cries of those around me that I realized what had happened.

The conductor - a pint-sized readheaded woman of about 30 - came out of her booth, crying, asking who had seen what happened. She became hysterical, looking to me like she would be the next one down onto the tracks. That would do no one any good. I and a few other TTC patrons with cool heads shepherded her up the escalator where there would soon be dozens of police waiting to take her statement. They could deal with her hysteria better than I could, especially away from the not-as-gruesome-as-I-expected scene below.

People were crying around me as the TTC staff moved us all up to street level where shuttle buses were being readied. The subway would be shut for a while to clean up the detritus of desperation below ground.

I felt nothing. The place I was in at the time - both physically and emotionally - had dulled my senses. The only thing I could think at the time was “Good for you!” I was a little envious, but in no way horrified or disturbed. It was what it was. A week before Christmas, despair had gotten the best of yet another dweller of this overburdened city.

Oh, as an aside, my gentleman friend wasn’t on he 2:03, either. Tardiness is a sin, dear.

He called while I sat not far from where the police were comforting and questioning the conductor. The phone rang, and I answered it “It wasn’t me.”

We met on the street, and walked the rest of the way downtown, through the cold and the human Christmas traffic.

Would anyone in the audience care to venture a guess how many Jews complained?

A children’s shop has removed toy pigs from farmyard sets in case they offend Muslims and Jews.

The Early Learning Centre ditched the pig from its HappyLand Goosefeather Farm toy set after it upset some customers.

One mother realised the pig was missing from the set she bought for her daughter’s birthday when she found a pig sty and a button that made oinking noises, but no pig.

Jews eat bacon. It’s not the 7th Century anymore, and there are no longer health concerns related to eating pork products. So yeah, how many Jews ya figure bitched and moaned about the wee plastic pig?

Once again, I’d like to thank Jesus for dying on the cross and making us the world’s only religion sensible enough to eat ham. Amen.

Rocking this look on the bus this morning was a blast. Especially since Halloween is a very North American concept. Sure, it originated in Europe, but it’s our thing over here. Toronto, being a very multi-cultural city, really loses out on Halloween. The newcomers don’t practice it, and their little kids - who would enjoy it most - don’t learn about it until they’re in regular school. If schools even teach anything beyond love thy muslim anymore.

I went costume shopping last night, and everyone in the shops was either black (born here), white (born here) or Japanese (any excuse to dress up!). You don’t see a lot of post-Communists or Muslims or even first-gen Jamaicans participating in the custom, and it’s very sad. With all the fun that goes into choosing a costume, dressing up and going out - trick or treating for the wee ones and partying for the big kids - it seems a shame that Halloween is as fringe-y  nowadays as Candlemas, and certainly not as popular as Ramadan.

Crime and the sale of donated aid supplies are undermining the aid effort for Pakistan’s flood victims.

When New Orleans flooded, we watched while people shot at relief workers and then screamed about FEMA trailers. They looted WalMart and used their emergency government debit cards to buy designer jeans.

When Haiti shook and all was destroyed, it only took 2 days before they were back to the business-as-usual of stealing, kidnapping and raping. They’ve yet to rebuild, despite the billions of dollars poured in.

And now we’re told that we’re mean and hateful for not giving more to Pakistan in the wake of their floods.

Pakistan doesn’t need money, or flour or rice. Pakistan needs Jesus.

Bug recommends The Daily Bug

Bug - my beloved chihuahua - and I have begun a new project for dog owners and dog lovers.

Check us out at The Daily Bug for all things doggy - news, gossip, nutrition and training. There’s even a recipe for doggy ice cream to help your pooch cool off this summer!

We’ve brought teh cute with lots of Bug pictures, as well as stories about World’s Ugliest Dog and Frodo, the beagle who saved his family from a fire.

There’s an email sign-up where you’ll receive a weekly digest from the blog, food recipes, tips and info on cool pup products.

Obviously if you are a cat person (or a Muslim), you may want to skip this. Just sayin’.

Do you click over every day? Grab the link via Twitter? Or get it in a reader?

What do you prefer? Would you like a newsletter ( I tried one last year and there weren’t many nibbles, but I know readership changes )?

The only 100% way right now to make sure you don’t miss any content is to subscribe to the blog and have it sent to your reader of choice. Click here to subscribe.

Thanks for reading!