‘Is this really the sort of man you want running our country?’

I remember watching American political attack advertisements and thinking 'I'm glad Canadians are too sensible and mature to be swayed by this type of rhetoric.' My national pride swelled three sizes that day. Today, that seems like a distant, fond memory. In this latest election, the Liberal, Conservative, and New Democratic parties are smearing their opponents with ads that use the same insincere concerned tone as the American ones do.

I wish that the ads were the only ridiculous aspect to this latest election. The promises that the candidates are pledging make CBC's The Current April Fool's day joke candidate seem sensible, and he vowed to pass a by-law that fined anybody under 45 who didn't give up their seat to the elderly. All of the parties are promising individual, short term financial rewards. The problem with this strategy is that each individual citizen doesn't receive enough money to make a difference in their lives, but the total program will require a huge sum of money, money that would be a lot more useful if it was spent in a lump sum. The Liberals promise to give every university student $1000-$1500. With rapidly growing tuition prices, I would be paying more with the refund this year than I did without the refund in my first year. The marginally reduced tuition fee will be just as prohibitive to students planning on entering university as the full fee is. It would be nice for students who are already financially able to go to university to have an extra $1000 every yea, but nice little perks like this should be reserved for boom time elections. If the Liberals truly wanted to make a difference, they would promise to establish more bursaries and scholarships directed to students who can't afford the high cost of tuition. The Conservatives plan to eliminate mandatory retirement in federally regulated workplaces. I'm sure that this promise was made with the keen awareness that Canada's elderly demographic is disproportionately large. This isn't in the best interests of Canada, however. While it is true that such a large retired population will cost millions of tax dollars to support, forcing them to retire will create thousands of jobs for younger Canadians. It is unfair that recent university graduates are forced to work poorly paying fast food jobs because the elderly wish to continue working for longer than they are capable. New employees will enter the work force with skills that weren't taught to the older workers and the elderly will receive a well-earned rest. The New Democrats wish to cap credit card fees. While I agree that spending money is important to stimulate the economy, this change will only cause Canadians to spend more money that they don't have. In a country where consumer debt is already a problem, the last thing we need is for more of our income to be eaten away by credit card fees.

Of course, the political parties aren't really to blame for this type of campaign. With a steadily dropping voter turnout rate, it makes sense that politicians are trying to engage Canadians with exciting (if deplorable and misleading) advertisements and individualized rewards. This mockery of the democratic process is perfectly appropriate in a country where 42% of voting aged adults don't seem to care care who is running their country.

http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=ele&dir=turn&document=index&lang=e

http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=ele&dir=turn&document=index&lang=e

My Guilty Pleasure

On a snowy winter day in December 2010, I discovered a television programme that would forever change the way that my peers evaluate me. When I logged onto the MTV internet video player, I never intended to find a television series that would become my primary tool of procrastination for my final semester of my bachelor's degree. Being the curious scholar that I was, I simply wanted to learn what all the fuss was about. That is how I became a fan of The Jersey Shore.

I am not proud of the hours I have spent (and will spend- one more season!) watching muscular orange people beat up beats. I completely admit that watching Ronnie and Sammy break up for the tenth time in three weeks hasn't helped me grow as a person. I know that watching a woman with breasts that defy gravity pee behind an unused bar counter isn't as sophisticated as an hour at the museum of natural history. Even so, I am surprised at the reaction I get when I tell my acquaintances that I enjoy watching The Jersey Shore.

The reactions I usually receive involve groans, the heels of palms being smacked against foreheads, 'Teea, why's?' or some combination of those elements. A CollegeHumor.com Venn diagram comparing babies, idiots, and stoners informs me that idiots like the Jersey Shore. I will forever be lumped in with dumb girls who like little dogs and hair bleach.

I must say that, for the record I do not believe that bleached blond women with teacup poodles are stupid, only that many of Edmonton's educated seem to automatically write off the intelligence of people who have these interests. Liking The Jersey Shore doesn't make a person more or less intelligent.

Don't get me wrong, I know that there are much better uses of my spare time. However, I choose to use my preciously few vacant hours to take a break from my life as an academic. I believe that is what most university students do. When I can't concentrate on writing my ancient civilizations paper, I don't want to watch a discovery channel programme on the engineering of the pyramids. After I memorize the designs of every flying buttress and every rose window in every French Gothic cathedral, I don't want to go to the art gallery to see sculptures that some painter left in a bar to melt in a fire. After I endure Cicero's thirteenth repetition of a mostly irrelevant point, I don't want to pick up a philosophy magazine and read about the trendiest theory on consciousness. I enjoy the content I am exposed to in all of my courses, but as Cicero and any good Roman would tell you, moderation is important for a well lived life.

If somebody actually spent all of their free time engaged in such worthy pursuits, I wouldn't fault them for calling me an idiot, but in my experience, this isn't what the average university student does with his spare time. At least, the diversions of my Jersey Shore hating friends aren't any more sophisticated. They include: drinking themselves stupid, watching fan renditions of death battles that match up unlikely video game characters, and listening to parodies of Rebecca Black's Friday. Their knowledge of which Teenaged Mutant Ninja turtle would triumph over the others won't expand their horizons any more than my knowledge of the pre-bar ritual of gym, tanning, and laundry has expanded mine. In fact, The Jersey Shore has taught me something practical here, namely how to be fresh and bring mad pick-up game, whereas their knowledge of which Teenaged Mutant ninja turtle would win in a fight is completely useless because turtles can't actually use nun-chucks.

The truth is that in my spare time, I'm looking for something more than a distraction from academia. When I have a dull and repetitive full time job, I will most likely turn to academic pass times to fill the new void in my life. Right now, I like watching eight oompa-loompas get drunk in public and bring strangers home because it reminds me that even thirty year olds who live with their parents and have no career prospects to speak of can enjoy their lives. Jersey shore reminds me that happiness is about perspective, and for somebody who is graduating University with a useless degree, an uncertain future, and no job offers, perspective is something that is sorely lacking. Until The Jersey Shore influences become a tanorexic binge drinker, I really don't believe that my peers can hold my love of the show against me.

Adventures in the Supernatural?

On the midnight of my 13^th birthday my friends and I were sitting on my bedroom floor. The only light came from several cheap, tapered white candles arranged around us in a circle. We were concentrating furiously on a burned and painted board suspended between our laps.

We had lovingly handcrafted our Ouija board. Although there are versions put out commercially by companies like Milton Bradley, one of the girls, Kallie, told us that only properly tooled handmade boards would be effective in communicating with the dead. Although she was a notorious liar, we followed her instructions anyway. At thirteen (and even now), I firmly and illogically believed that hand made things were always superior to store bought ones. Kallie had a way of tapping into our core beliefs when she lied, so we believed her even when we didn't. And so, we burned the upper left corner of the scavenged board and painted a sun in it. On the upper right corner we painted a moon. Then, in the best archaic and spooky characters our preteen hands could draw, we painted the alphabet, the numbers 1-10 hello, goodbye, no, and yes.

My slumber party, like most of my Jr. High life, didn't go according to plan. The other girl, Krissie, arrived at my house and immediately told us that her grandfather just died. Predictably, when we all placed our index and middle fingers on the pointer (the lens of magnifying class suspended between two index cards), it spelled out P-A-P-A, the pet name she called her grandfather. She burst into tears and accused both of us of trying to make her cry. This destroyed the ambiance and make us both feel pretty lousy so we decided to call it a night. I hadn't known that she called her grandfather papa, I had never heard her talk about him. I wonder if Kallie knew. We never played with the Ouiji board again.

The board sat abandoned in a drawer for six years. It has been branded in my mind a tool to allow preteen girls to manipulate each other. Then, inspired by a post on an internet forum, I decided to break it out again, solo. I didn't really expect anything to happen, but the poster of this thread was having so much fun using her board to answer questions, I thought the process would relieve my boredom for at least a few minutes. I suppose a part of me was hoping that it would definitively prove that one of my friends had done the deed. I had read theories that we subconsciously move the pointer ourselves to spell out our deepest desires. I wanted to know if Krissie subconsciously moved the pointer herself in order to create a a badly desired connection with her grandfather.

To my surprise, the pointer didn't stand still. It didn't spell out my deepest, subconscious desires. It did something that I never could have predicted. "Hello" I said out loud, feeling foolish. The slider slid slowly to A, and then to K, and then back to A, and then to K. The speed was unnatural, slow like molasses. Startled, I moved the pointer to goodbye. "Hello", I said again, feeling less foolish and more intrigued. It did the same thing. I tried over and over again. Sometimes, for a change of scenery, the pointer would travel repeatedly between A and Z, sometimes it would trick me. When I said "what year did you die?" and the pointer would move towards one, and then 9, and suddenly it would change its course and move towards k, repeating the same, baffling pattern. Nothing I did could break the cycle. When I decided to wait and see how long the loop would continue, the pointer would travel the familiar path but slowly gain momentum. I became convinced that it wouldn't stop until I forced it to, so I moved the pointed to goodbye. After forty five minutes of these games I was throughly weirded out, so I put the game board away and went to bed. I never did pick it up again.

I have been reluctant to tell this story. I can count on one hand the number of people I've relayed it to because I'm worried they will think that I'm either crazy or looking for attention. I really only told it to others because I was looking for some sort of affirmation, some shared experience. Since then, i've grown less self conscious about the experience, perhaps because I have grown comfortable with its truth. I haven't found anybody with a similar story, however, and I'm not ready to join the crazy internet super-naturalists.

I don't believe that Ouija boards work, but I can't deny that the pointer moved without a conscious effort on my part. Neither the rational nor the irrational explanations seem very plausible to me. I'm not convinced my subconscious had anything to do with the event, If my subconscious could to communicate with me through the board, I wonder why it didn't have anything more interesting to tell me. Following such a bizarre, meaningless pattern seems like an odd thing for me me to conjure from the secret depths of my mind. Likewise, the supernatural idea that the dead would communicate through a Victorian parlour game seems suspect. If I was a ghost I'd be more inclined to hijack a text document and write an essay than spend hours spelling out a single sentence on a piece of wood. I also wonder how the dead can form sentences at all with their brains locked away in their bodies.

I have shrugged my shoulders and claimed defeat. There are few experience that have left me as baffled as this one. I don't a strong desire to understand what happened. I supposed I feel sort of privileged to have had an experience that cannot be understood within my world view. A mystery is an exciting thing, and since I have so few of them, I think I should cherish this one.