Merry Christmas, if you’re into that sort of thing!

As bad news gets tiring:

A Transgender Woman Has Exclusively Breastfed Her Baby, & It’s A Dream Come True

@ Mish

Yay! Whadja get? *happy bounce* I hope you like them!

@Katamount:
Yes, four times. That said, I’ve lived in Toronto for twenty-five years, and actually owned the house I’m living in for twenty of those last twenty-five. I believe homeowner rolls are part of where they get the information for jury panel requests. And as I noted, both of the last two times I was only called in for one specific case, which didn’t actually go to jury trial, so I was only down at the courtroom for the day. (One of them was just the morning; we were out of there by 9:30 or so. File in, wait for judge, get told case was resolved late last night, judge asks if anybody present works for the TTC because there’s apparently some other case about to start where somebody who knows about internal operations would be useful.) Both of the first two times were pre-9/11, so there wasn’t the metal detector at the court building entrance yet.

Based on https://www.attorneygeneral.jus.gov.on.ca/english/courts/jury/juryduty.php it’s a minimum of three years between panels.

@kupo

Nope, you’re not alone on that score. I found Tim’s proposition of Dawn that went awry very off-putting and entitled, textbook “Nice Guy (TM)” behaviour.

I never watched the Office – but I don’t understand that fans of Martin Freeman think he is like ‘cute little nice guy’ who is sweet and funny in interviews. I find he seems arrogant and self – important, so I am not surprised before about what SFHC said. it seems like this is his character, and simply he wants everyone to believe he is lovely ‘normal’ guy.

@Shadowplay – Late as usual, but I wouldn’t mind taking a look at your writing*. I followed you on Twitter (my profile pic shows me reading a book upside down). 🙂

The Colton Boushie case is distressing. I don’t buy for a minute that Gerald Stanley’s gun went off by accident; who does? My dad commented that it seems like a cynical claim – that the Stanleys don’t expect to be believed, but that the “accident” statement is sending the message that indigenous people better stay off white people’s land or else they might also meet with an “accident”. He’s phrasing it in a dramatic way (I mean, I’d think they’d want to be believed in some way, if only to avoid jail time), but that doesn’t mean he’s essentially wrong. There’s deeply ingrained racism here.

*My fiction reading/writing experience tends towards realist, surreal, sci-fi, experimental and comedic stuff – not that I don’t like other genres, but I don’t know as much about, say, paranormal or fantasy

@Surplus to Requirements, re article – I like the “prevention vs. cure” approach. I’m a bit iffy about the writer’s tendency to lump feminists together, or suggest that those who favour legal recourse support more incarceration. But there are some good practical suggestions in it:

[Equality] means expanding the social safety net so survivors don’t need to remain with abusers. It means delinking health care from employment status so that one’s health doesn’t depend on remaining in an abusive workplace.

My representative Keith Ellison tweeted a great answer to the “economic anxiety” Trump voter.

If you voted for Trump, know that his hate will not feed your kids, heat your home or help cover your medical bills. But his budget proposal is a real threat to take those things away from millions of families as he transfers wealth to the richest few.

Not many in Washington to be proud of, but he’s one of the few.

I’m watching the NBC coverage of the latest school shooting. The white male suspect was seen on camera with the police, so no mention of the word terrorism, of course.

And so sorry to spam, but given that it’s Valentine’s day, I have to wonder if this was motivated by romantic rejection or if he was an incel type. Complete speculation on my part though.

re: school shooting (5th one in U.S. this year, 2 on 22January…)

the dumpster-fire-in-chief offered “thoughts and condolences”, so that’s it for action from washington

ETA:

oops, “prayers and condolences”… good xian that he is….

What can one say about a mass shooting which hasn’t been said a hundred times before? There’s a reason the Onion runs essentially the same article after every mass shooting. No doubt they’ll run it again this time, and once again it’ll be probably the best comment on the event in any US media. Which is a ridiculous state of affairs.

On a completely different topic: is the video below creepy, or not?

https://twitter.com/toodooda/status/963673296733646858

@Surplus to Requirements, regarding class bias in jury selection:
Quite possibly. That said, I don’t know exactly what criteria are used to make up the lists they send out, but given that most of the actual mailings for jury duty have to be made up locally based on caseload requirements, property tax rolls are one of the easier places to find names that would be guaranteed to be local. But even just requiring a fixed address adds a class bias on its own.

Toronto’s also a bit of an unusual case in that the main Federal courthouse in Toronto is basically the busiest courthouse in the country, due to the population of the area.

The two combined together would go a long way to explaining why I’ve been called up four times. (Yes, I own my house; it helps that I bought it some 20 years ago, not long after a previous local speculator boom crashed and dropped housing prices here for a while. I’m under no illusions about how much of that boiled down to luck in timing.)

@Katamount:
Yes, a lot of the science fiction fans and the like I hang out with were geeking out over the new Governor-General’s coat of arms back when it was first released.

@epitome of incomprehensibility, others:
I don’t know that all that many people believe that it was actually an accident, instead figuring it was an ‘accident’ in the old mob boss ‘wouldn’t want anything bad to happen’ sense.

But yeah, there is some deeply ingrained racism there. There’s a reason why the CBC web site started disabling comments on any articles to do with First Nations peoples, because the comments tended to get very bad very quickly. http://www.cbc.ca/newsblogs/community/editorsblog/2015/11/uncivil-dialogue-commenting-and-stories-about-indigenous-people.html

In some ways I was lucky there as well: one of the people I went to school with was a son of one of the hereditary chiefs, who was also a fairly famous woodcarver and associated with the Royal B.C. Museum. Knowing him helped inoculate me against a lot of the casual racism of what ‘those people’ were like.

I find it interesting to look back on my life and see what events led me to be the sort of person I am today. I get the impression that the problem with a lot of these people involves actively avoiding such introspection.