An odd beginning to the week...

Headline: (Ottawa Citizen) "Nun crucified; priest faces murder charge." Perhaps it was the news that he proceeded to officiate at her funeral that pushed me over the edge.

How is a writer supposed to out-do this? A work of fiction on this topic would be dismissed as contrived. The critics would have a field day with it. Art doesn't imitate life these days--it struggles to keep up.

Headline: (Globe & Mail) "Kazemi wasn't censored." An opinion-piece by veteran journalist Barbara Yaffe, who apparently believes that removing an exhibition of photographs by the murdered Iranian-Canadian photojournalist from a library in Montreal's Côte St. Luc district doesn't qualify as censorship. See, it wasn't the photographs, but the accompanying text, "in part written by (her) son," that caused the problem. Yet we are informed a few lines further down that the town council sanctioned the removal of the photographs themselves. I believe that Yaffe's vanishingly-fine distinction would qualify as a good example of Talmudic pilpul. The fact remains: Kazemi was murdered in Iran for daring to take photographs, and here at home they are being removed from libraries.

Headline: (Globe and Mail) "Union protest greets opening of Blue Man show." It's seems that this aggressively anti-union bunch of artificially pigmented Americans, which refused to work with local unions in Toronto, has little regard for freedom of assembly: it tried (unsuccessfully) to get the union protest banned. Well, we all know that "freedom" is a highly coded word down there, so no surprise. Anyway, they obviously have company. Here's Martin Bragg, artistic director of the Canadian Stage Company and Blue Man enthusiast: "It's 2005; we're not sitting in a coal mine."

Moving on from labour illiteracy, how about "Homolka longs to be the girl next door" (Montreal Gazette)? On that slightly creepy note, perhaps this morning's excursions into the mediated world should end.