On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

Likud and Hamas are mutual enablers.

Israel and Palestine alike deserve much better than they're getting right now, on top of both peoples having the right to exist.

Leaving it at that.

I think we're about to be deprived of the company of our Russian and Belarusian friends and friendly acquaintances no matter what we decide about internet contact on our side of the Putinist War Against Ukraine.

https://twitter.com/nexta_tv/status/1500553480548892679

So I got to see the last installment of Retail(: the Comic Strip) today, apparently. Because Sunday comic strips are always published on Saturdays in Canadian newspapers. Even when there's a Sunday edition of that particular paper.

It's...anticlimactic. And unsentimental, too.

Perhaps that shouldn't have been a surprise.

...and Doctor Strange was as good as I'd hoped it would be. Yes, a tad formulaic, but at times like these days, there's a not-so-strange comfort in that aspect of it. Some good visual nods to Ditko's original design work in the 1960's comics work there. If anyone here has an opinion on the 3D-formatted edition, I'd be glad to read that, good or ill.

I've read on Facebook from several sources that William Christopher AKA Father Francis Mulcahy from M*A*S*H has died. He won't have been the last to die this year, but that hurts a lot of people across the planet anyway, because he and his colleagues on that series helped keep a lot of people from hurting worse than we already were for a couple of decades. Even after the series ended on CBS, because re-runs and later on, tapes and DVDs (and I assume iTunes and the like are keeping the effect going too now).

Thank you, Mr. Christopher.

There might be more later in the evening...

This was one of the minor reasons for sadness this week: Joe Fiorito is calling it a Career with the Toronto Star. I'll miss his commentaries on life in Toronto, even though I don't live there. He's had this way of making the specific universal to my mind...

So Canada is exceeding expectations - exceeding hopes at this point! - in terms of medal count at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio. At the same time, tomorrow night in Kingston, Ontario will mark a change that many will count at best as a mixed blessing.

One reason for that: tomorrow night is currently what I call the last-we-fear concert of the Tragically Hip.

Gord Downie, the lead singer and front-man for the band, has been diagnosed with what is currently described as terminal brain cancer. Given the current state of the medical arts regarding the particular form that's inside Downie's skull right now, he might be able to buy a few additional years, but not much more than that. Barring the proverbial miracle, of course.

Between those two situations in the national cultural news, it's not going to surprise me if Canadians in general are suffering some degree of emotional whiplash right now.

That last-we-fear concert will be broadcast from Kingston nationwide by CBC. TV, radio, internet...you name it, they're using it to get the show out to as many Canadians as want to see it from coast to coast to coast. So if the Canadian streets outside of Kingston, Ontario (where the concert is going to be held) seem emptier than usual tomorrow night, that'll be part of why it's so.

We may be a little...off...as a people for a few weeks afterward. At least that's my suspicion at the moment.

I've been reading about the shootings at Pulse Orlando this morning.

If you lost someone there, I'm sorry for your pain. 

I'm sorry to read the election news via iPolitics and CBC this morning. 

One: David Bowie dead of cancer at 69.

Two: Ottawa's had its first homicide of 2016.

I just got a "thanks, but no thanks" note from a firm I'd still like to work for.

Oh well. Maybe another year for that. Meantime, I keep working on the skills stuff.