Toron­to has been sub­ject to a high­er lev­el of gun-crime this year, large­ly insti­gat­ed by Amer­i­can orga­nized crime mov­ing in. Youth street gangs are being pumped, armed and financed sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly. There was one dra­mat­ic inci­dent, where a teenage girl was killed by gang cross­fire at a major down­town inter­sec­tion, which par­tic­u­lar­ly upset peo­ple. Read more »

Vio­lent storms and tor­na­does (25 of them were count­ed) are cir­cling Toron­to, adding spice to the hot weath­er. I sit here, work­ing to pull out of a finan­cial mias­ma, but the desire to trav­el gnaws at me. . To be back on the move, again, that would be so good. I even find myself play­ing Ian Tyson’s “Four Strong Winds”, the Cana­di­an anthem of wanderlust.

Stampy the Rab­bit is my most fre­quent com­pan­ion. He’s a gor­geous slate-grey breed with fur as fine as a mink. He is noth­ing like the dull rab­bits kept in cages. I let him have free run of the apart­ment, and he lives a life of adven­ture. He is per­fect­ly house­trained, using either of two box­es of wood shav­ings. When I am read­ing on the couch, he will climb onto my chest and beg treats, and he goes into ecstasies when I mas­sage him… but that’s an effect I can cre­ate on many crea­tures, large and small. When on the alert, he will stand on his haunch­es like a gopher, ears alert. There is a mouse some­where in the apart­ment. It is too clever to be caught in any of the traps I’ve set. I think Stampy mon­i­tors his sub­son­ic squeaks. They are build­ing a 44-sto­ry con­do next door to my build­ing. Weird con­struc­tion nois­es and vibra­tions shake the apart­ment in mid-after­noon. I won­der how Stampy inter­prets them?

For many years, I had a cat who would hitch-hike with me. I got lots of rides mere­ly from the appeal of his pok­ing his head out of my back­pack. Think of the effect that a rab­bit would have in the same role! But I don’t think he would take to it. Actu­al­ly, I don’t think I could man­age to get him into a bag with­out a vio­lent strug­gle that would result in bro­ken limbs and fur­ni­ture. Stampy may be gen­tle when he sits on my chest, but he has the heart of six lions and the fierce­ness of a komo­do dragon.

Back to the blog! The last month has been rough, with an over­whelm­ing work­load. But things are eas­ing off.

Cana­da Day, today, and I rode my bike around down­town, aim­less­ly, to enjoy the per­fect weath­er and look at the crowds every­where, pic­nick­ing, lis­ten­ing to con­certs in parks, and gen­er­al­ly enjoy­ing the nation­al hol­i­day. Peo­ple seem to be hap­py. If they are sup­posed to be ter­ri­fied by the dis­cov­ery of a “ter­ror­ist cell” a few weeks ago, they show no sign of it. 

The “ter­ror­ist cell” busi­ness, was seized on by Amer­i­can politi­cians as proof that Cana­da is a “hotbed of ter­ror­ism” because of its “lib­er­al immi­gra­tion laws” (!). But it was tak­en with remark­able calm­ness by the Cana­di­an pub­lic. Most peo­ple could see at a glance that there had nev­er been any sig­nif­i­cant dan­ger. The “cell” con­sist­ed of a hand­ful of extreme­ly stu­pid sub­ur­ban teenagers who would have had dif­fi­cul­ty orga­niz­ing a sur­prise birth­day par­ty, let alone “behead­ing the prime min­is­ter” or blow­ing up sky­scrap­ers in the finan­cial district.

But one of the annoy­ing side-effects was the incred­i­bly stu­pid kind of “jour­nal­ism” that fol­lowed. Was “mul­ti-cul­tur­al­ism” to blame? Did it bring Cana­di­an poli­cies of “mul­ti-cul­tur­al­ism” into ques­tion? What non­sense. Read more »

The Catholic Church in Que­bec has sur­prised every­one with a pecu­liar pub­lic­i­ty cam­paign. They have pur­chased space on bill­boards, bus-stops, and oth­er adver­tis­ing places, in order to dis­play swear-words. This requires some expla­na­tion. French Cana­di­an swear­ing is the lamest on Earth. Don’t expect any­thing like the baroque splen­dour of Mex­i­can swear­ing, or the earthy imagery in Russ­ian curs­es, or even the repet­i­tive sex­u­al obses­sions we are famil­iar with in Eng­lish. The basic French Cana­di­an swear words are dis­tort­ed forms of the words for the arti­cles used in a mass: “taber­na­cle”, “chal­ice”, “host”, “sac­risty”.

How­ev­er, this can­not be explained by any reli­gious sen­si­tiv­i­ty. French Cana­da, espe­cial­ly in Que­bec, is one of the most sec­u­lar soci­eties on the plan­et. Church atten­dance is very low in Cana­da, but by far the low­est in Que­bec. The over­whelm­ing major­i­ty of French Cana­di­ans have lit­tle or no inter­est in orga­nized reli­gion, though many will say they have some pri­vate, per­son­al faith, unin­flu­enced by any church. Most peo­ple have no idea what­so­ev­er what any of these “swear words” mean. If you catch your fin­ger in car door, you say “tabernac’ ”, or “taber­nache”. It doesn’t call up any image. It’s just a mean­ing­less word. The aver­age per­son, if asked to explain its ori­gin, prob­a­bly wouldn’t be able to tell you. By con­trast, nobody who swears in Eng­lish is unaware of the mean­ings of the swear words. Read more »

My friend, the artist Taral Wayne, recent­ly showed me some ancient Indi­an coins and asked me what I could tell him about the city-state for which they were mint­ed. He thought I might be inter­est­ed because he was sure they were from one of the ancient republics. He thought it might be named “Yaud­he­va”, which was what was scrawled by the coin deal­er on its mount­ing card. There was also anoth­er word describ­ing the fig­ure au ver­so, but nei­ther Taral nor I could make it out clearly.

This was all a bit mis­lead­ing. Yaud­he­va would mean some­thing like ” — ? — which is god­like”, an unlike­ly name for a city. But after look­ing through my old notes on ancient Indi­an republics, it dawned on me that it must just be a mix-up between “v” and “y” by the dealer.

Once I knew that it was actu­al­ly Yaud­hiya, then it was sim­ple to untan­gle. That is the name of one of the repub­li­can con­fed­era­cies of north-west­ern India. I have exten­sive notes on the Yaud­hiya republics. They are not as well-known as the Audum­bara republics, but they are rea­son­ably well-record­ed from the 5th Cen­tu­ry BC onwards. They are men­tioned in lots of ancient lit­er­a­ture, includ­ing the Mahab­hara­ta, the Puranas and in Panini’s trea­tise on gram­mar. They acquired fame, and a rep­u­ta­tion for val­our, by defeat­ing Alexan­der, halt­ing his progress into India. The coin is prob­a­bly from the Yaud­hiyan repub­lic of Rohti­ka (or Rohi­ta­ka), some ruins of which sur­vive in the minor provin­cial city of Rohtak in the State of Haryana.

The Yaud­hiyan con­fed­er­a­cy was a col­lec­tion of city states shar­ing the same trib­al ances­try, much like the ear­ly Latin cities. The Yaud­hiyan tribes spread across what it now the Pun­jab. They devel­oped repub­li­can forms of gov­ern­ment quite ear­ly, and main­tained them quite late, despite tem­po­rary sub­mis­sions to the Kushan kings. When they threw off the Kushans, they proud­ly re-estab­lished their repub­li­can con­sti­tu­tions. But they con­tin­ued to mint coins fol­low­ing the Kushan mod­el, and cor­re­spond­ing rough­ly to the Greek drach­ma, on which the Kushan coin was based. Read more »