I guess it is time for me to stop abusing the comment widget at gocomics.com and start posting my stuff here. Two square inches are not very handy to write stuff! I'm going to add more stuff to this like character information later on. I've drawn more strips based around real places as well, and I'll post pictures of those places now and again. Also, the strips will also always be bilingual here.
What was to say of 2013? The pope resigned, that only happened a few times in centuries. Liberal catholics (like me!) view this new, fresh pope as the symbol of a religion that's (finally!) more about how people treat each other and less about what they do with their privates! I was given a copy of the New Testament when I was ten and I remember seeing the word "pharisee" more often than the words "adulterer", "born in sin", "homosexual" and "abortion" combined! In short, Jesus condemned hypocrites.
What else? The native canadian awakening of Idle No More. That's, among other things, Theresa Spence's hunger strike in Ottawa, a trip that took some teenagers on a trip from northern Quebec to Ottawa but Harper could not meet them, he had to go greet pandas that had been given to a Toronto zoo by China. That was also the blockade of Elsipogtog on shale gas. This time everyone, including english canadians and acadians, was on the side of the Natives. Nobody wants shale gas to start drilling in New-Brunswick now! But by the past, similar events (like the Oka Crisis) forced the intervention of the army! Needless to say, New-Brunswick was a pretty nervous place in October and November. The RCMP came out of this as a foreign company's henchmen, puppets instead of the community pillars that they should be (and that I've seen them be at times).
Eventually, someone somewhere along the chain of command came to their senses and the drilling company (SWN) got out of the area, and is not supposed to return until 2015. Next provincial elections are this year and this issue is going to sink Alward: If we are stupid enough to reelect the guy after this, then we probably do diserve to have our darn water poisoned! My instincts tell me it's too early to say this chapter is closed, though...
No matter on what side of the national language barrier you were this year, you had a city hall to laugh at. My US readers are already familiar with Rob Ford. He's what you'd get if you called Rush Limbaugh your mayor, with the drug habits of Gregory House. A little further down the St. Lawrence, Montreal's city hall has been a game of musical chairs this year. Mayor Gerald Tremblay resigned, amist an ongoing corruption scandal. He gave his spot to Michael Applebaum, who was supposedly above all suspicion until he got arrested. The city remained without a mayor for a few months until the last election. With a low turnout, Denis Coderre was elected the new mayor. Coderre may be one of the few major political characters of the province to be spared by the ongoing corruption scandal, he's not very popular and his election was greeted with a twittersphere-full of #tabarnak 's.
This year made it official: the west has a new Stalin called Vladimir Putin! He suscpiciously gave Snowden asylum (I hate the NSA as much as the next girl, but Putin's Russia is not exactly a model of transparency either!), he saved Barack Obama another war in Syria and wrote in an american newspaper but that bane of gay rights, canadian ecologists and Pussy Riots wants to get his hands on our North Pole and will host the next Winter Games! His name is also spelled P-O-U-T-I-N-E when translated in French. Sooky and Canada's favourite mixture of french fires, cheese and gravy. I'll give you a moment to fathom all the fun canookie comedians and tv hosts had over poor Vlad in the last 13 years because of that...
On a related note, there were also asteroids falling all over Russia. For a while, we all suspected two things; either Michael Bay took control of God's computer or space decided to send us back all that junk we've been feeding it since the Sputnik.
I'm sorry for bringing you about the tenth allusion to Miley Cyrus on a wrecking ball you guys must have seen in the last few days, but Mimi insisted on bringing her up. Many stupid things have been said, people accused her of making money with her charms, other people accused the people around her of making money off her charms. The paradox is, every paid member of the media industry that accused anyone of capitalizing on sex in this scandal has been doing precisely the same thing, using sex to find easy readership.
We've all seen this before with Janet Jackson in 2005, with Britney and Madonna in 2003. Hollywood has been this shallow since there was a showbiz. If this shows anything, it's that of all the buttons it's possible to push, there is still a big red one that's called "sex". If we were as comfortable about it as we pretend to sex would not be exploited for any scandal, people wouldn't pay attention!
A few nights ago, at Radio-Canada's Bye-Bye 2013, comedians Laurent Paquin, Antoine Bertrand and André Sauvé made fun of Miley and Femen (the bare-breasted feminists who distrupted l'Assemblée Nationale) with hardly hidden sexual frustration. the whole idea of their sketch was that to point out that whenever people see some skin, they can't think so don't bother trying to make a point if you have boobies. Even in this day and age, the idea that sexualized people can have an intellect is very disturbing. They already have a very scary power on us, God help us if they start thinking!
In the old times, they told us "sin" was the demon. Now popular "wisdom" assume that men have a "little head" that puts them in trouble all the time and that women never act stupidly, because women never want sex. Evo-psych assume that men are there for nothing else but reproduction but if all logical thinking stopped at the smell of the first hormome, including the few brain cells dedicated to finding food, shelter, water and avoiding predators, the cavemen of evo-psych did not live long enough to have anything to reproduce!
On a less stupid note, two death at the two opposite sides of the political spectrum; Hugo Chavez and Margaret Thatcher. I could not bring myself to be another leftist voice to mindlessly praise Chavez, and I did not like Thatcher's policies, I'm sure they're arguing somewhere on a cloud but it's mean and pointless to bash dead people, even those you don't agree with so here they are, both of them with candles.
...but they pale in comparison to that Candle of candles, Nelson Mandela.
Happy New Year!
