Seen.

This is not photoshop.

What is colon hydrotherapy, you ask? It’s an enormous enema. A Dieticians of Canada publication describes it as follows:

Colonic cleansing or irrigation, touted as a treatment for cleansing the colon, involves the insertion of a rubber tube through the rectum into the large intestine. A continuous forced flow of up to 20 gallons of warm water eventually causes the body to expel the contents of the colon with the water. Colonic cleansing has been legally approved by Health Canada for use before radiologic endoscopic examination. Various peer-reviewed scientific studies were also found exploring pre-operative colonic cleansing as a means to prepare patients for a medical examination of the colon. A meta analysis investigating the efficacy of such treatment, for other than medically necessary purposes, concluded that there are no benefits derived from mechanical bowel cleansing; on the contrary, such a treatment may lead to further complications. Medical doctors do not recommend colon cleansing unless it is performed by a physician in preparation for a medical examination of the colon.

They offer gift certificates!

Friday Classical Music Interlude: Shameless Fangirling of Jessye Norman

As I was practicing this evening, there occurred a confluence of events that has cost me not only the remaining hours of today, but also my heart.  (1)Working on some Wagner, wondering what the hell “sehr massig bewegt” really means as a tempo marking, so I decided to see what there was on Youtube.  (2) Scribbled in the margin of my music, the advice of my singing teacher: “Listen to Jessie Norman.”

Turns out I misspelled her name, but I found her anyway.  I hereby declare my rapturous and awestruck utter fangirl love for Jessye Norman.  She was born in Augusta Georgia, September 15, 1945.  She was singing gospel music in her church by age 4, and became an opera fan when she heard a radio broadcast at age 9.  Since then, the list of her accomplishments is an enormous wall of text.  This is a woman whose voice can do basically everything.  She can sing the whole range of female voices, from deep contralto to the top of the dramatic soprano range.  And she can act! and and and  I tell you what, how about I show, rather than tell.  Some of the following videos are long but I promise you, you will not regret the time you spend.

Sauce for the Anti-Choice Gander

I’ve had this post on the back burner for months, since a commenter at Shakesville (I think) said, you could never get away with restricting men’s access to Viagra the way state legislatures have restricted women’s access to abortion in America.  And no, you couldn’t.  But interestingly enough, it’s pretty easy to make a set of arguments for restricting access to Viagra, that are pretty similar to the arguments for restricting access to abortion.  For the most part, all you have to do is search the text, and replace “woman” with “man”, “abortion” with “Viagra”, and “ends a human life” with “begins a human life”.  (If pre-born human life is that important to you, you should take its creation as seriously as its destruction.)  Then there are a few restrictions that claim they’re protecting women, and you just have to look at the flip-side: preventing men from hurting women.  For some of the restrictions, I’ve invented an imaginary evil radical feminist anti-het-sex conspiracy to substitute for the Religious Right.

Every restriction on access to Viagra I propose below, is either a fact of life, or a legislated restriction, on abortion in at least one, and often many, American states.  When the restrictions and their justifications are imposed on men, they look pretty radically man-hating (never mind that being unable to get a hardon is nowhere near as traumatic as going through childbirth against your will), but in their anti-abortion form, it’s not just fringe whackaloons making the arguments I’ll list, it’s people elected to public office.

Fuck Cancer.

Now it got Jack Layton.  He was a good man.  Someone in politics for what seemed to be the right reasons.  A politician who passed the “would I have a beer with him” test with flying colours – I did have a beer with him and we had a lovely time.  He was one of those people who could make you feel like the most important person in the world the way he listened to you.  And now just like that he’s gone.

I’ve really had a problem with the discourse (or really, lack thereof) that’s surrounded his fight with cancer.  The dogged optimism.  The refusal to come out and say, when you’ve had prostate cancer and it’s back, and on top of that you’ve now got another kind of cancer as well, you’re pretty much fucked.  And also, things like what Edmonton Strathcona MP Linda Duncan said on CBC this morning: “If anybody could beat cancer, it would be Jack.”  I understand the sentiment.  I really do.  If cancer was something that could be fought with the will, who better than Jack, the perpetual underdog who never gave up.  If cancer was something you could fight with hard work and determination, who better than Jack, who lead the NDP from near-demise to official opposition status.  Except that cancer doesn’t care how hard you fight.  If it did, we’d still have Jack.  And a whole lot of other people too.

Fathers’ Day Rant

Around Fathers’ Day, the heteronormative masculinity enforcing messages involved in the associated marketing push absolutely drive me up a wall. According to the marketing that bombards us, “Father” seems to be some kind of monolithic hive-minded creature that only likes and does certain Very Manly things, and should only want certain kinds of gifts, and should only do certain kinds of Fathers’ Day activities.  And I get angry on behalf of my dad, because  I feel like it’s wrong to burden and confine him, and all men for that matter, with the expectation that fathers have to be a mix of Tim the Tool Man, Homer Simpson, and a randomly selected epic role acted by Mel Gibson, or else they don’t count.

Mozart – Don Giovanni (K.527) – Zerlina’s “Batti, batti” aria

Don Giovanni premiered in Vienna in 1787.  The author of the libretto, Lorenzo da Ponte, described it as a dramma giocoso, a work that includes both comic and tragic elements.  The comedy includes a variety of mishaps, while the tragedy includes attempted rape, murder, and finally the Don being dragged straight to Hell, complete with a chorus of demons.

The background to the scene above:  Don Giovanni happens upon a wedding party.  Zerlina, played by Joan Rodgers, is the bride.  Giovanni decides he wants Zerlina, and arranges for her to become separated from the rest of the wedding party, including the groom.  He tries to seduce her, but the seduction is interrupted when one of Giovanni’s previous victims happens on the scene.  In the video clip, Zerlina is re-united with her future husband, who is extremely jealous of the attention Giovanni is paying to her.  Zerlina wins his affection back with a combination of flirtation and self-abasement.

I’m currently working on learning this aria.  There are a lot of things that make it fun to sing.  It’s fun to sing flirtatious characters.  The melody is relatively simple, but is entertaining from a technical perspective, with its interesting leaps and runs.  Done well, it’s an excellent show-off piece.  I hope to get it to that point.

I also hate it.  It seems to be a case of Feminism Ruins Everything.  To me, a woman who has grown up expecting to be treated as an autonomous human being and the equal of any man, it’s a really disturbing piece.  Masetto should be reassuring Zerlina that he will do his best to support and protect her, not blaming her for Giovanni’s unwanted attention!  And, given that Masetto is being a jealous prick, Zerlina should be tearing him several new orifices, not offering to stand like an unresisting lamb to be beaten and then kiss his hand.  Trying to wrap my emotions around the idea that Zerlina’s behaviour could be realistic for a woman of her social status in that era, is sobering.  It’s not really that long ago, after all, that women really did need to get married Or Else.  And that any suspicion of non-virginity or infidelity would lead to Or Else.  A woman like Zerlina might have been so totalized in her identity that it would never occur to her to expect anything but jealousy from Masetto, and that she would in fact blame herself for having attracted Giovanni’s attention.  Unfortunately, when I’m as disturbed as this idea makes me, I don’t sing well.  Still working on finding a way of singing this aria musically, without grossing myself out.

Some Canadians are more Canadian than others

At least, to the Harper government.

At first it was just Omar Khadr and Maher Arar.  Oh, and Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad Abou El Maati and Muayyed Nureddin also had lovely “vacations” in Syria.  Abousfian Abdelrazik was detained and tortured in Sudan (with apparent collusion, if not at the direct request of, our government), and when he finally got out of prison, Ottawa put every hurdle they could come up with against bringing him home.  Then there are Abdihakim Mohammed and Suaad Haji Mohamud, who in separate incidents were stranded in Kenya and left to fend for themselves by their government – in fact, in Mohamud’s case it was the Canadian government that accused her of identity fraud.  These people seem to have something in common besides having gotten the shit-end of Harper’s foreign policy stick*.