Reid’s first novel now available at McNally Robinson

With gratitude and love I dedicate this book to my parents, Helen and Bruce Dickie, whose gifts I used every day of my life, and to Linda, who lit my way.

Available now at McNally Robinson

http://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/9781772800173/reid-dickie/play-the-jukebox

Moments away from puberty, young Jim Crawford begins to discover how his newly effervescent maleness gives fresh meaning and expression to manhood in his family, friendships, community and beyond. Set in a small Canadian prairie town just as the tumultuous social and cultural changes of the 1960s begin, Play the Jukebox is a character-driven story entwining bright wholesome and dark pathological expressions of masculinity. As his own unique gifts reveal themselves, Jim learns the heights and depths to which men will go to defend family and future and how shared experience creates diverse forms of camaraderie between men and women.

Jim’s life revolves around pop music and records. The 45 – the little record with the big hole – is king; radio disc jockeys, record players and jukeboxes spin the seven-inch discs constantly. He discovers intimate links between hit songs and his own development as he travels from town to town changing the records in jukeboxes with Percy Peel, a mystery media mogul who leaves lasting impressions on Jim. As they did for millions of 1960s youth, The Beatles play a defining role as one of Jim’s change agents.

McNally Robinson: If you are coming into one of our stores, we suggest that you confirm that the book you want is in stock by emailing the location nearest you: Grant Park, Saskatoon, or by phoning the location nearest you.

My Letter to Harper about Secret Police Bill C-51

Reid Dickie

I sent the following letter to Stephen Harper today regarding Bill C-51 which is supposed to give police power to deal with “terrorism.” Instead it takes away our right and freedoms based on little more than fear-mongering and media booga booga.

Because the Ref-Cons are under the thumb of Big Pharma, Bill C-51 contains directives regarding alternative medicine. For example, up to $5 million fine for growing, preserving or sharing an unregistered natural health product like garlic, vitamins, herbs. The bill turns ordinary Canadians into “terrorists” if we use medicinal alternatives.

My letter went to every MP in Ottawa via one mass emailing. You can find all their email addresses here.  Scroll down, copy and paste them into your address bar.

http://butterflystorms.blog.ca/2011/07/05/canadian-mps-email-addresses-web-pages-11431378/

Mr. Harper,

   Bill C-51 is your most anti-Canadian bill yet.

   This dreadful secret police bill is much too vague in all its definitions, gives too much power to CSIS and overreaches far too deeply into the lives of ordinary Canadians. It gives police the power to detain people who haven’t committed a crime based on mere suspicion, i.e. search and seizure without warrant. This is your devious way of trying to get control of the internet, censor its content and to control medical alternatives. Why are directives against alternative medicine included in this bill?

   This bill does nothing to protect our freedoms; it undermines them. No matter how much fear-mongering you do or how many phony terrorists you haul out in front of the cameras, we are not willing to give up our rights and freedoms. Your paranoid anti-democratic views represent a very small portion of Canadians.  

    C-51 is alien legislation. This wasn’t even drafted in Canada. It was written elsewhere and you were told to apply it to Canada. You know you are wrong which is why you are desperate to limit debate and abuse your power further. How can you make an informed decision without all the information?

    The current oversight of CSIS has been under funded and understaffed for the duration of your reign and now you claim this new bill has sufficient oversight. There will be even less oversight and accountability with C-51. What kind of spooks are you turning our country over to?

   I am 100% opposed to Bill C-51. It should be scrapped now.

      Sincerely,

        Reid Dickie

            Winnipeg

Read Ralph Nader’s letter to Harper about Bill C-51 here

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/02/18/whats-happening-canada-open-letter-stephen-harper

MCC Thrift Stores Turn 40

Reid Dickie

Regular readers of my blog know I am a veteran thrift store haunter. This was a major source of fun and occasional profit for Linda and me starting in the 1980s. We developed what we called rummage tours that could hit as many thrift stores as possible in the fewest miles. We traveled the South Rummage Tour dozens of times over the years. Its route was Niverville, Morris, Altona, Plum Coulee, Winkler, Morden and Carman, a perfect loop south of Winnipeg with seven stores to shop and a nice day`s drive. I still do the South Rummage Tour now and then. All the stores are bigger now, more variety, more professional but still offer the thrill of the hunt, successful or not.

These seven stores are all Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) thrift stores, an organization that is celebrating its fortieth year this year. I was doing some heritage recon in southern Manitoba today and stopped in at the Altona MCC thrift shop. I found these three spiffy neckties, two 1960s skinny ones and a nice wide silk from the 1940s, not a soup stain among them. My total cost: $1.25 for all three. I donated a couple of bucks as I always do.

Altona was the first town to have a MCC thrift shop because local resident Selma Loewen took to heart a comment made at the 1972 MCC Manitoba annual meeting by John Hostetler, director of MCC’s Material Resources department. He reported that MCC was reducing overseas shipments of used clothing, commenting “We need a machine that will turn clothing into cash.”

Selma thought up “the machine” that she excitedly told three friends about over tea.  Linie Friesen, Susan Giesbrecht and Sara Stoesz agreed a little store selling used items at cheap prices would work!  They opened the very first MCC thrift store on March 17, 1972 expecting it to last maybe six months. Today there are almost 200 MCC thrift stores in Canada and the U. S. Read the rest of the story.

Linda and me agreed that the humanitarian work done by the MCC around the globe was always worth supporting. If you can, please shop MCC thrift stores in your area. This is a list of all the ones in Canada.

On Saturday September 8, 2012 many Manitoba MCC`s will contribute to the annual Relief Auction Sale. The proceeds from the auction will go to support MCC food programs feeding thw world`s hungry. To be held in Morris, MB at the stampede grounds, the sale is a fun fundraising event. Here is the line up of activities at the auction sale. For more information on making donations to the sale or volunteering, go to mccmanitoba.ca

The King of Canada Does Some Horsetrading

Last Tuesday Prime Minster Harper got off the helicopter in front of the Parliament Buildings carrying a baby piglet under each arm. The squared-away Mountie guard snapped to attention, saluted and said, “Nice pigs, sir.”

Harper replied: “These are not pigs. These are authentic Arkansas Razorback Hogs. I got one for Minister of Defense Peter MacKay and I got one for Minister of International Cooperation Bev Oda.”

The squared-away Mountie again snapped to attention, saluted and said, “Excellent trade, Sir…”

Deeds Done in the Darkest Hours

Reid Dickie

“It’s not the people who vote that count. It’s the people who count the votes.” – Joseph Stalin

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” – Benito Mussolini 

How pathetic that I have to quote two monsters from the 20th century to frame the crimes against freedom and democracy currently unfolding in Canada. Hot on the heels of Spy Bills C-11 and C-30 comes Robogate or whatever you want to call the highly organized and concerted effort by the Reform-Conservatives to fix Canada’s 2011 election and get a majority government. 

Their tactics are familiar and have been used consistently in American elections to confound and confuse the electorate before and during election day. Here are four quick pages from the US Playbook for Political Scumbags that partly explain how the Ref-Cons did it in Canada:

• In the weeks leading up to the election, thousands of people received calls from people claiming to be from the Liberal Party. The caller would be rude, call late at night, early in the morning or in the middle of the night, say outrageous things then hang up;
• On election day, robocalls were made to thousands of Liberal and NDP households telling them their voting place had been changed, usually to somewhere an hour away with very bad parking. (The criminality is very refined and thorough);
• On election day opposition voters were offered rides to their voting place but the rides never showed up; 
• Also on election they used this form of sabotage, from a news report: 

 “When Robin Warren of Montreal showed up to vote on Monday, she said her name had been crossed off the voter list. She had to sign an affidavit swearing she had not voted already. While Warren was at the polling station, she said another woman who lives in the same apartment complex had an identical problem.

“On my way back home after we dealt with all this I ran into another group of ladies outside and all their names were crossed off the list, and they had to go through the same thing of signing affidavits. There’s something not right here. There’s too many people in one building,” Warren said. She called Elections Canada to complain but she said the elections agency called the situation an irregularity.”

Wake up Canada! This isn’t “dirty tricks.” That’s mainstream media doublespeak intended to downplay the significance of, what one of my friends calls, treason. Other MSM terms for this include “prank” “hoax” and “mischief.” In Harper’s Canada, treason is now described as “mischief.” Is that the Canada you live in? 

Here are some numbers for your consideration:

• So far, 43 ridings (see list below) from coast to coast where robocalls were used have been identified;
• The Ref-Cons won 29 of the 43 seats;
• Six of those ridings were won by less than 1000 votes, three of them by less than 500 votes, two by less than 30 votes;
• The Ref-Con majority in the House of Commons is just 10 seats;
• 100,000s of illegal robocalls were made to Canadians before and during election day;
• Two firms (Racknine in Edmonton, Responsive Marketing Group [RMG] in Thunder Bay) connected to the Ref-Cons have been identified as sources of some of the calls.

There is much much more information about this to emerge but based on what we know so far, is there a smoking gun directly linking Harper and the Ref-Cons to these crimes? You decide. In the National Post’s first story they included this paragraph about election day events at Elections Canada:

Internal Elections Canada emails obtained under Access to Information legislation show officials were rattled by the calls. At 11:06 a.m., election officer Anita Hawdur sent an email to legal counsel Karen McNeil with the header: “URGENT Conservative campaign office communications with electors.” Hawdur reported that returning officers were calling to ask about the calls. McNeil responded by asking Hawdur to alert Rennie Molnar, the deputy chief electoral officer. He later emailed Michel Roussel, a senior director: “This one is far more serious. They have actually disrupted the voting process.”

This links Conservative campaign office in the header with intentional disruption of democracy. Interesting wording: “This one is far more…” as if there were other crimes. How much did Elections Canada really know?

This week, one of the call centre workers at RMG blew the whistle by publicly saying that on election day her work was making calls on behalf of the Ref-Cons to intentionally misdirect voters away from their proper polling place. I admire the bravery of whistleblowers and hope she can preserve her anonymity and suffer no consequences. I pray for her. 

An unsettling news item turned up today. Some of the calls were made from a call centre in North Dakota! Oh, Canada.

Since both the RCMP and Elections Canada (its head is appointed by the prime minister) are under Harper’s thumb, their already-compromised “investigations” won’t likely turn up anything of substance, just more smoke and mirrors.

What you can do!

Since the MSM is falling down in its job again, it’s up to the online community to react appropriately. Let the politicans know you are ticked. Leadnow.ca has an online petition that is sent to Harper, other party leaders and your MP. Almost 30,000 Canadians have already signed it in the past few days. Find the petition at http://www.leadnow.ca/en/index

Inform your friends and family. Talk to them, email them, text them, post information and/or links on Facebook and Twitter. Make sure they understand the dire times we are living in and what’s required of them and everyone to preserve our freedom and democracy.

These are the 43 ridings that have been identified as targets of the Ref-Cons anti-democratic tactics. Cui bono – who benefits? The Ref-Cons won 29 of these ridings. If you live in one of these ridings, your Ref-Con member may not be legitimate. The ridings in bold are Ref-Con seats won by fewer than 1000 votes:

• Sydney-Victoria (NS)
• South Shore-St Margaret’s (NS)
• Egmont (PE)
• Mount Royal (PQ)
• Davenport (ON)
• Guelph (ON)
• Hamilton East-Stoney Creek (ON)
• Eglinton-Lawrence (ON)
• Etobicoke Centre (ON)
• Essex (ON)
• Cambridge (ON)
• Haldimand-Norfolk (ON)
• Kitchener-Conestoga (ON)
• Kitchener-Waterloo (ON)
• Kingston & the Islands (ON)
• London North Centre (ON)
• London West (ON)
• Mississauga East-Cooksville (ON)
• Niagara Falls (ON)
• Nipissing-Timiskaming (ON)
• Oakville (ON)
• Ottawa Centre (ON)
• Ottawa-Orleans (ON)
• Ottawa West-Nepean (ON)
• Parkdale-High Park (ON)
• Perth – Wellington (ON)
• Peterborough (ON)
• Simcoe-Grey (ON)
• St. Catharines (ON)
• St Paul’s (ON)
• Sudbury (ON)
• Thunder Bay – Superior North (ON)
• Wellington – Halton Hills (ON)
• Willowdale (ON)
• Windsor Tecumseh (ON)
• Saint Boniface (MB)
• Winnipeg South Centre (MB)
• Elmwood – Transcona (MB)
• Winnipeg South (MB)
• Wascana (SK)
• Edmonton Centre (AB)
• Edmonton East (AB)
• Saanich-Gulf islands (BC)

Write to your MP personally. I highly recommend this especially to Ref-Con MPs elected by fewer than 1000 votes. Cut and paste email addresses for all MPs are at http://sandrafinley.ca/?p=3297 Oh, what the hell, email it to every MP.

Put your imagination to work and come up with other inventive forms of protest against the creeping fascism of the Ref-Cons.

For inspiration, I leave you with two things to ponder.

First, this quote from Ref-Con PM Stephen Harper: “Human rights commissions, as they are evolving, are an attack on our fundamental freedoms and the basic existence of a democratic society. It is in fact totalitarianism. I find this is very scary stuff.” Pot, kettle, black. 

And the lyrics to an Elvis Costello song called Night Rally that details a typical evening in a country with a fascist government:

Night Rally

Elvis Costello 1978 British version of This Year’s Model 

I would send out for assistance but there’s someone on the signal wire
And the corporation logo is flashing on and off in the sky
They’re putting all your names in the forbidden book
I know what they’re doing but I don’t want to look
You think they’re so dumb, you think they’re so funny
Wait until they’ve got you running to the
Night rally, night rally, night rally

Everybody’s singing with their hand on their heart
About deeds done in the darkest hours
That’s just the sort of catchy little melody
To get you singing in the showers

Oh, I know that I’m ungrateful
I’ve got it lying on a plate
And I’m not buying my share of souvenirs
You can stand to attention
You can pray to your uncle
Only get that chicken out of here
Everyone gets armbands and 3-D glasses
Some are in the back room
And they’re taking those night classes

You think they’re so dumb, you think they’re so funny
Wait until they’ve got you running to the
Night rally, night rally, night rally

Hear Elvis sing it.

Wake Up Canada! Big Brother is coming to a front door near you

Reid Dickie

Sinister, secretive, untrustworthy, tyrannical, compromised by a foreign country, indebted to their corporate masters and unsullied by conscience, the Ref-Con (Reform-Conservative) regime currently ruling Canada is a dog’s breakfast of right-wing extremists, religious fundamentalists, greedhead capitalists, stunted idealogues and just plain dummies, not unlike a lot of alleged democracies these days. Similarly, this government is trying to make it legal to spy on every Canadian who has a computer and/or a cellphone without a warrant. Spy Bill C-30 stinks of Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and Communist China and the massive negative reaction to it by hundreds of thousands of Canadians is appropriate.

Canada’s Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, a long-standing windbag, sponsored this paranoid piece of “legislation.” Subsequently and deservedly, Toews has had his dirty laundry paraded before the public when the sordid details of his acrimonious divorce were published on a Twitter account. Although already public knowledge, the revealing details caused poor Vic such great despair and indignity that he got all victimy and launched an “investigation.” What a hoot! (Memo to Toews: if you can’t stand the heat, don’t light the fire. Plus, you make a lousy victim!)

Because language is a virus from outer space, every bill introduced in Canada has two names, a long and short name. Bill C-30’s long name is An Act to enact the Investigating and Preventing Criminal Electronic Communications Act and to amend the Criminal Code and other Acts. Its short name, the mainstream media name, is Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act. That’s different. Read the text of odious Bill C-30 here. Be brave.

Just so you know who has their hand up Toews’ back and wrote the script for him, on November 5, 1997, a bill was introduced into the U. S. House of Representatives. Its short title was H.R.2815 — Protecting Children From Internet Predators Act. 

Booga! Booga! Taking another page from the U. S. Neo-Con playbook, Toews thought he could fearmonger Canadians into ceding more of our rights and freedoms by invoking child pornographers as the boogeyman. Explaining the simple options to Canadians, Toews said, “either stand with us or with the child pornographers”  – fearmongering at its most amateurish.

Today Toews has backpedaled about three country miles from that because Canadians didn’t fall for it. Instead we started to share all our mundane personal information with Toews that we thought he needed to know. On his Twitter account #TellVicEverything and in emails to parliament, ordinary Canadians began confessing their sins to Deity Toews. Like? Like parking closer to one yellow line than the other in the mall parking lot, cleaning up cat puke and waiting for more, just checked – I’m still not a child predator and asking for a copy of an email accidentally erased. You get the picture. Thousands responded! Call it satire, zen, karma, justice, Canadian humour, eh. Consequently, the true nature of a foolish man with a little bit of power was appropriately revealed to the world, a deflated balloon, a sad buffoon.

Bonus: Because social media and bloggers drove and dominated events, the mainstream media went into a tailspin. Canadians weren’t buying their brand of bullshit. Editorials and pundits ranted about how the bill makes the internet safer for everyone, blah, blah, blah but it didn’t seem to work. The MSM are failing to convince more often now but don’t tell them yet. In spite of declining readership and viewership, they’ll be the last to know how truly irrelevant they have become. 

Things Stephen Harper Does to Seem Human

Posing with his wife and a cow and, yet again, trying out his famous attempted smile, this is only one example of the hundreds of awkward pictures of the soulless cyborg stooge who “governs” Canada for his corporate masters on a website called Things Stephen Harper Does to Seem Human. The rest of this embarrassing stuff is at http://thingsharperdoestoseemhuman.tumblr.com/

1870s TV Ad for Free Farms in Western Canada

Reid Dickie

A delightful impossibility!

In 1870 the Dominion of Canada bought Rupert’s Land, which was pretty much all of western Canada, from the Hudson’s Bay Company. After passing the Dominion Lands Act in 1872, the government embarked on an advertising campaign to entice people from Europe, the United States and eastern Canada to come to western Canada and take advantage of the free land and unbound opportunity. This campaign went on well into the 20th century. I gathered together ten of the Dominion’s ads from the period, several of them covers for pamphlets about Canada that, more often than not, wildly exaggerated the potential of the prairies. Basically, they were propaganda. In that same tradition, I envisioned what the Dominion’s TV ad might have looked like in the 1870s. Click the poster to watch.

When Inkpaduta was around, nobody slept sound.

Reid Dickie

Inkpaduta was a Santee Sioux who eagerly participated in the Battle of Little Big Horn then fled across the border to Turtle Mountain in southwestern Manitoba. Inkpaduta harboured great hatred for white people and without remorse murdered them at every opportunity. He was a bad cat to have in the neighbourhood!

Giant Manitoba Sinkhole Update – June 13

Reid Dickie

ReadReidRead is no longer the only place you can get fresh information about the 50-foot-deep sinkhole south of Dauphin. (Updating my opening statement on June 25/11, the only place to get pics and info is my blog and youtube channel. Still! No one has picked this up! Amazing. It gave me over 2600 hits last Sunday but interest is abating now. More info and video on this site soon.) I talked at length today with landowner Anthony Genik who says he’s done a couple of media interviews and there are frequent visitors to the site now. Anthony says the walls are caving in and sliding down a bit more. He thinks the pit is deeper now at the north end, “by a few feet,” which contradicts earlier reports of further drastic sinking. However, there are still pieces of the timothy field breaking away around the outer rim and tumbling into the hole. “It’s still settling, still moving,” explains Anthony. The bottom of the pit is bone dry, no sign of water seeping in from the side or below.

Anthony says the talk about a geologist coming to look at his land “is just gossip, so far.” Since he’s not sure what to call the pit in his field, Anthony is keen to talk with an expert and get some clarity about what happened. It could be a sinkhole, which is what I’ve been calling it, or it could be the result of rotational slump, a phenomenon that usually occurs on coastlines. Anthony said while the central portion fell straight down without much destruction, the northern end received violent shifting with great devastation in the forest.

Whatever we decide to call it, the excellent timothy crop continues to grow tall and green fifty feet below the rest of the field at the bottom of the chasm.

I will be making another firsthand report after a quick trip out to the sinkhole one day this week.

I thank Cheryl Haliski McKay for today’s pictures of the phenomenon. Watch my short video of the sinkhole.

Cheapest Gas in the World

10 COUNTRIES WITH THE CHEAPEST GAS IN THE WORLD

from website Financial Jesus

10. United Arab Emirates – $1.40/gallon or $0.37/liter

9. Egypt – $1.21/gallon or $0.32/litre

8. Bahrain – $1.02/gallon or 0.27/liter

7. Qatar  – $0.83/gallon or $0.22/litre

6. Kuwait  – $0.79/gallon or 0.21$/liter

5. Saudi Arabia – $0.45/gallon  or $0.12/litre

4. Iran – $0.42/gallon or $0.11/liter

3. Nigeria – $0.38/gallon or $0.10/litre

2. Turkmenistan – $0.30/gallon or $0.08/liter

1. Venezuela – $0.19/gallon or 0.05$/litre

Winnipeg, Canada – $5.77/gallon or $1.27 /litre

We all need to know about abiotic oil