VANCOUVER RECORDS IT'S FIRST CRYONIC SUSPENSION "PATIENT" - July 2010 - Mother frozen in hospital and shipped to Cryonic Suspension facility

Canada's governments have a long history of blocking debate on Cryonic Suspension - the freezing of whole bodies or heads of people who hope for resuscitation in the distant future. Our only exposure to the concept is Hollywood movies and the popular cartoon series FUTURAMA. The permafrost of Canadian public opinion (cheered on by Funeral Industry lobbyists) have prevented a few well intentioned Cryonics Societies from taking root and thriving here. Why so many years of mocking these groups?
.
Cryonics have been satirized in this country for decades. Humour columnist Gary Lautens of the Toronto Star set the tone way back in 1964 when he advised prospective volunteers for Cryogenic suspension "Let me know if the light really goes out when you close the refrigerator door, eh?" Then an urban myth arose in 1967 claiming that Walt Disney had been "frozen". Not true, but the mockery grew intense. If memory serves, even CBC comedians Wayne and Shuster got in on the act. Funeral Directors nationwide enjoyed the joke. Well the real story today is that a few Canadian believers in the concept are refusing to be thwarted.

Vancouver Milestone - B.C.'s First Cryonic Suspension patient- July 9, 2010
At 1:30 AM July 3rd a Vancouver woman was found slumped in front of a PC. Perhaps she was surfing the Net as we all do late at night. Her husband phoned 911 and she was rushed to the Emergency at a nearby hospital. At 12 Noon she was moved to the ICU and given a brain scan. At 6:30 PM a physician pronounced her dead... and that ending was the start of a new life. The life of a long term cryonic "patient".

The quoted price was US$28,000, with an initial deposit of US$1250 required to set complex procedures in motion. This unplanned case (the family has never been a member of any Cryonic Society) was an imposition on the American Cryo-support team because they had to assemble on the July 4th long weekend holiday. The Vancouver family paid the initial deposit with a PayPal account and engaged the services of a cooperative Funeral Director. (The Funeral Industry is very hostile to the whole concept of cryonics.) The balance of the $28,000 fee was paid by bank transfer.

The patient's son, accompanied by the Funeral Director, were waiting in a room adjacent to the ICU until hospital staff declared his Mom legally dead. They rolled in a temporary coffin containing almost 80 pounds of dry ice, and removed her from the hospital. A few hours later she was sealed inside four body bags, each inside the next, and transferred to a sheet metal box. An additional 120 pounds of dry ice was added. The metal box was nested with thick Styrofoam sheeting inside an outer case made from West Fraser Plywood. The lady was stored until the Funeral Director could get the necessary paperwork from the U.S. Consulate. Properly sealed with a Customs declaration the coffin was transported to YVR on July 7 and loaded aboard a Delta Airlines flight to Detroit on July 8. The patient was entrusted to perpetual care in the U.S. because there is no service offered anywhere in Canada. Cryonic Suspension is outlawed here and all the Law permits is the transfer of a loved one to a foreign storage facility. Technical details on the suspension process can be read at the Cryonics Institute website. They trumpet this case as their "98th patient".
.
This is the Cryogenic storage facility in the Michigan where British Columbia's first Cryogenic storage patient is resting. MRS. X died on July 3, 2010 in a Vancouver I.C.U. and was flown to Detroit on July 8. Her son arrived at the facility on July 9 and witnessed the two day produre as his mother was cooled and finally frozen for perpetual storage. The procedure cost - US$ 28,000.

Vancouver Cryonic Milestone -The transfer completed, the staff of the Cryogenic support team display the empty transfer case, custom built to Cryogenic standards, by a Vancouver Funeral Director. Note the Yellow label "HUMAN REMAINS" and "YVR".

.
Vancouver Cryonic Milestone - A Cryonic Institute staff member displays the transfer case, shipped from YVR Vancouver, B.C. The patient's body was carefully preserved in 200 pounds of dry ice, resting inside four rubber body bags, a sheet metal coffin, Styroifoam and a plywood outer case.
.

The CREMATION, INTERMENT AND FUNERAL SERVICES ACT (2004) outlaws the selling or even promotion of Cryonic services in this British Columbia. A local funeral business will be prosecuted if it even displays brochures on the premises. The ACT can be read here.
.

The only advocacy for Cryonic services in Canada is undertaken by the few societies which exist here. The largest group meets in Toronto. Here in British Columbia the concept is totally thwarted and the Funeral Industry is ever vigilant. From time to time elected officials issue "Comfort Letters" to assure Cryonics advocates that their government is not picking on them. Here is an example signed by Minister Rich Coleman in 2002.
.

POURING PEOPLE DOWN THE SEWER - COMING SOON TO "ECO-FRIENDLY" CITIES... PERHAPS YOURS

I have examined plenty of ghastly imagery in my time ... "horrors of war" footage, targets of assassinations, monstrous mutilations of clan enemies, and charred chunks of suicide bombers. All of it is repugnant and reprehensible. My reaction to atrocity is often sadness or outrage but even natural carnage becomes objectionable when men fail to show compassion. That was certainly the case when a series of photos which showed me bodies of Haitian earthquake victims being hauled to a landfill mixed with building rubble. Bucket loaders had scooped up corpses and concrete and poured them into dump trucks with no attempt to offer a moment of dignity for the dead, most of whom must have been very spiritual in life.

I had similar feelings of outrage last week as I read a story in the DAILY MAIL about growing interest in a chemical reduction process to get rid of human remains - a gruesome process known as RESOMATION. The cynical attempt of some to sell this outrage as an an "eco-friendly," progressive service to the public, is an insult to the intelligence of anyone who still has a caring bone left in their body. I haven't been this disturbed about callous trends in the Funeral Industry since my first reading of "Behind the Formaldehyde Curtain," extracted from Jessica Mitford's investigative book THE AMERICAN WAY OF DEATH.

You can read the entire DAILY MAIL article (here) or you can settle for all the "Who cares anyway!" responses to the piece which arose next day. Just tickle Uncle Google with a few key strokes and he'll point you to them.

Three grinning funeral "Directors" demonstrate an American version of a Resomation system. I would imagine their first exports will be to Mexican drug cartels, some of which are already know to dissolve their opponents in 45 gallon drums.

A human volunteer lays his body in stainless steel RESOMATION tank which will reduce his body to a bucket of sludge in less than two hours. Unlike the ceramic bathtub destroyed when it was used to dissolve a rival drug dealer's corpse in an episode of BREAKING BAD, this engineered process is guaranteed to destroy thousands of bodies maintenance free.

This bucket holds the sludge recovered after dissolving two large pigs. Dissolving a human being produces half as much sludge, but more guilt than any of us should be willing to bear.
You can watch a slide show of the process demonstrated (here). No, the company is not a subsidiary of I.G. Farbenindustrie. It's a proud American firm named CYCLEDLIFE.


THE FUNERAL INDUSTRY FLIES UNDER JUDICIAL RADAR

CANADIAN CRIMINAL CODE - "Dead Body"
"Section 182 (b) Every one who improperly or indecently interferes with or offers any indignity to a dead human body or human remains, whether buried or not, is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years. R.S., c. C-34, s. 178."

This section of Canada's Criminal Code usually gets trotted out when gang bangers or other outlaws burn or scatter the bodies of people they've murdered. It's about time it was amended to deal with "Resomation" and other processes which may be concocted to make people vanish without trace, as they do in George Orwell's allegory of a world where living memory, identity and history disappear.

.

Too many people seem to have come to the conclusion that life has no purpose or meaning. They are not burdened with a sense of responsibility, they feel no loyalty to a community, they have no personal goals, romance is a humbug, Art does not move them, reading is a bore, even raw pornography doesn't stir their flesh. Sadly they chose to forgo the 1.2 children that was their due. Since they have a sneaking suspicion no one will come to their funeral anyway, cremation has become the 'send off' of choice. Almost 75% of "the departed" in Greater Vancouver are now disposed of in the crematoriums. East Asian families are now permitted to burn their dead on an open air pyre located beside the Fraser River.

I have a passion for the past and I often share news of fresh archaeological discoveries with my son. We agree that human remains should be treated with dignity and respect. Always. When we examine the burial practices of past cultures we notice an emphasis on something of the eternal in the human spirit. Love, for instance, is an expression of the eternal and a recognition that we are not simply clever animals residing at the top of a food chain. When for instance we find human remains which have been carefully interred in a fashion which documents love in perpetuity (as below) we have to question our own resolve to do what is fitting and proper. "Would I do any less for those I love?"

The B.C. Government will punish any property owner who discovers aboriginal remains and fails to accord those remains their lawful due. It is very strange that respect for our own dead continues to erode and that we may reach a point where traditional burial and the provision for perpetual care disappears from our culture.

Although the family relationship of these adolescent remains are in dispute - a brother/sister, or a bonded couple, there is no denying the fact that their burial ceremonial was invested with a degree of love and loyalty that is rarely matched in our own time. I am overjoyed that their bodies were not left exposed to the jackals or the vultures, because their embrace is a promise that something of human existence, and our individual lives, is eternal. We can count on it.

The Final Word: My thanks to Sandy Chang, a student in Burnaby, B.C. who drew my attention to a Japanese book called THE CATALOGUE OF DEATH which includes a section on plans or current practices for disposing of the unwanted dead. This illustration (from the Taiwan edition of the book) shows how Swedes are getting the job done. The human sludge is not washed down the drain but instead used for garden fertilizer. I like how the machine has an earth friendly" recyle" logo.

Vancouver - where the angry disabled may open fire

It's been a crazy week worldwide, hasn't it? It's a chore just to single out the worst examples of bad behavior. Witness Gordon Brown, leader of the "Labour" Party in Britain. Gordo loses the national election yesterday, but does he admit his defeat? Nooooo! Today he is reported meeting with his strategists to cobble together an offer to the third-place finisher, the "Liberal Democrats". It's an arrogant, but not unexpected attempt to cling to POWER.

Witness the behavior in another European democracy. In Athens, that ancient capital of culture, the strong men have institutionalized criminal behaviour. A kleptocratic regime has been falsifying Greek public accounts for years, and colluding with powerful unions in a sharing of the spoils. Now that the rat is out of the bag, possibly setting the European Community up for a domino like collapse of its shared economy, the Greeks are braying "Help us, Help us". Legions of soft and pampered Greek workers are demanding the "right" to retire on bloated benefits packages at age 55, and this week demonstrated the violence they will use to safeguard their "rights". Witness the firebombing of an Athens bank, and the immolation murder of three bank employees. Wow, the self righteous evil of it all !

Insert - May 18th. I caught a CBC Newsworld segment this morning which would make a cute Youtube moment. Fred Langan and Carole MacNeil were laughing their asses off at the absurdity of Greek pension legislation which allows citizens in "dangerous occupations" to retire on a full pension at age 50. No one would quibble that coal mining is a dangerous job(although some may doubt that coal is a Greece industry). Langan noted that the list of dangerous jobs in Greece is ludicrous, and includes TV news readers. The point is that taxpayers in several countries are being screwed over to provide billions for the Greek bailout - which is going to be squandered in thick bogus Greek pension packets. The horror!

How about our local shakedown culture? Isn't it more therapeutic to kick your own cat rather than throwing a shoe over the fence? The point is folks, that in a nanny state like England or Greece or indeed our own socialist British Columbia, crime evolves or adapts to exploit the modernized habitat. In a socialist country leaders will toil like Trojans to grab and hold power, for decades if they can. Their loyal followers (we call them supporters here) compete over a rich menu of government benefits. They are the "cheque people," those who cannot exist without subsidy or have adapted to life as a total dependant.

March 31, 2009 - a CTV news chopper hovered over a parking lot in Gibsons, B.C. where an RCMP officer had just shot an angry woman in the parking lot outside an assisted living facility. This is her wheelchair and blood.

On March 31, 2009 the local CTV news affiliate broadcast dramatic footage from "Chopper 9" which was hovering over the location of a multiple shooting. The gunman was already down and emergency crews were swarming the site. The shooter, we learned next day, was Linda Lorraine Howe, the resident of an assisted living facility in a bedroom community northeast of Vancouver. Howe, who was allegedly wheelchair bound, had been resisting all attempts to evict her from a subsidized unit in the complex, going so far as to circulate a petition among residents. After shooting the manager she loaded a wheelchair with her weapons and carjacked a vehicle in the lot outside. There an RCMP trooper knocked her down with his service pistol. Interviewed a few days later, her father laid the blame for her behavior on a head injury sustained in a car accident. Mr. Howe's remarks were almost as confusing as his daughters behavior:


The interesting facts which emerged in court testimony are that while she was injured in 2007 she had been occupying the assisted living unit since Dec. 2006. In other words she had a history of playing the system, which predated the accident. At the time of her arrest I commented in this Blog that I found fault with any man who would place weapons into the hands of a woman with emotional problems. This week we learned that there was a further chain of incompetency involved. This woman was clear enough in her thinking to prepare an armed defence against eviction, and even managed to assemble an arsenal in her room even though though her room was video monitored. I am reminded of Winston Smith in Nineteen Eightyfour who sat in his alcove with his back to the telescreen writing "Down with Big Brother!" I conjure an image of Linda sitting in her suite reading Orwell's novel, with a smirk on her face. (see my footnote)



Linda Lorraine Howe - a tight cropping from a Dec. 2008 snapshot. In March of 2009 Howe refused to submit to eviction from a care home she was ineligible to occupy. She shot the attendant who was serving final Eviction Notice. Her trial continues in B.C. Supreme Court.

This week Howe is being tried in the B.C. Supreme Court. It's all rather routine and she may never utter a word in her own defence. It only remains to be seen whether she will "do a little time" behind bars or perform a little penance in a group home. Either way, she remains a ward of the province. Actually she is minor figure in this piece. The testimony of a score of heavyweight groups and agencies will fill the trial transcript.

What I did find remarkable in the limited coverage of the trial, was testimony concerning the CCTV camera system installed in the residential complex. The idea that Howe's room was video monitored I find repulsive. (No mention was made of audio pickup.) How does a resident manage to exercise the urge to cuddle, pick their nose or masturbate, if there is a camera? To my way of thinking, the denial of privacy was just as dangerous a catalyst for violence as the threat of losing the subsidized housing she had grown dependant on.

What the nominal leaders of this province will never understand, (until a disaster turns off the energy supply for a week or two or our economy implodes), is that social engineering has not created a stronger more resilient B.C. population, but rather a community of selfish interests which is going to react very, very badly if any attempt is ever made to have them resume greater responsibility for their own lives.

Testimony supporting the charge of attempted murder in a nursing home: Video surveillance exists INSIDE each bed unit of a B.C. licensed care facility in Gibsons ! and yet intrusive surveillance failed to detect a long term, angry resident caching weapons in her room... two rifles, a pistol, knives, etc ???!!!

If a disabled 40 year old woman could create such havoc, imagine what thousands of healthy young men and women are capable of accomplishing if they reject our society's values and laws? Come to think of it, have not the 60,000+ veterans of the B.C. drug economy already served us warning?

Update May 15 - testimony in court yesterday disclosed fresh information including the fact that the video monitoring system active in the defendant's suite was installed by Ms. Howe herself, in attempt to catch staff should they mess with her property. As I am no Winston Smith, I will just add this footnote without altering my reference to Orwell's novel.

ANN COULTER - Vancouver SUN steals a car and does a Drive-By Hit

I know this is a sucker's game. Spouting off about what is published in the local paper is like shouting invective at the TV. Once they've got you mad, they win. So we put them on ignore. They become background noise. I've gone from buying three daily papers in the 90's down to buying NONE .... my tally is three editions of the Vancouver SUN in ten years. Just think of the trees I've saved, and the thousands of display ads I wasn't exposed to. Since my wife has left Chinese newspapers laying around, that explains why our house is full of stuff from Chinese owned shops. If whitey wants to sell us furniture he better advertise in the "non traditional" media.

That said, I Googled the current flap over Ann Coulter's invitation to speak in Ottawa. Just a few days ago I read a snotty, intimidating email (on display below) which a kook hackademic in Ottawa (Francois Houle) shot across Ms. Coulter's bow. His snot-gram caused a little buzz on the Net. That was his plan. Pre-emptive engagement. I guess it was too much to be hoped that Ms. Coulter would appear, stand her ground, and when Houle provoked her, kick the sissy boy in the nuts. Instead her event gets cancelled. Sissy boy wins.

Googling for an update, what do I find but today's colour splash on the VEE SUN page? Seven... count 'em, 7 photos of the lady smeared with good 'ole Canadian mud. "right-wing U.S. firebrand"... "Ultra-conservative", Blah, Blah, Blah. Coulter is best selling book author, but the SUN runners don't read books. They settle for Google search and double click on pages which promise to put bullets in their gun. Scrape and reshape pre-chewed nuggets of tasty invective. The Sun steals a car, does a drive-by, hides the gun for the next hit... and calls that journalism. They give Coulter the Sarah Palin treatment, and the public is well served?? Not!

Die Ann Die! What to make of the SUN pasting seven photos of Ann Coulter on their wall, like a collection of WANTED POSTERS. Wanted for expressing a non-conforming opinion.

This is the snotty email that Francois Houle launched in a pre-emptive strike against Ann Coulter's invitation to speak in Canada. Mr. Houle is the stereotypical Canadian sneak - the smiler with a knife, grunting and sweating as he cowers in the bushes for his next victim. "I therefore encourage you to educate yourself.." wrote Houle. Huh? "How many fingers do you see now Winston?" "Two? No Winston. In Canada that's three." If you like this, you will love Houle's email to Stephen Harper, critiquing the Tory Blue Paper addressing the Crisis in University Funding. "... I draw your attention to the Globe's editorial on the sixth quarter of the Ninth Three-Year Plan."

Dateline Toronto: March 1987 - A group of pod people swarm a university student who holds a dissenting view on foreign affairs. This is what was planned for Ann Coulter in Ottawa. This is what constitutes political "discussion" in the Canadian mobocracy. I have research binders filled with crap like this. Anyone who has read Nineteen Eighty-four will recognize this as a Canadian variant of Orwell's Two Minutes Hate.

What should Canadians worry about more - the rise of an intrusive Post 911 Orwellian police state, or the tenured hacks on university campuses who do the heavy lifting for the Thought Police? Remember the immortal words of Clarence Darrow - "There is no such crime as a crime of thought: there are only crimes of action." If you are willing to condone the public gagging of a woman who is law abiding, then why not just send your kids to an Iranian university? In Iran they will be taught to lynch or stone the non-conformers. Houle is not on record for denouncing Islamic fascists. That takes balls, which he ain't got.

POST TOUR UPDATE: Rex Murphy devoted his column to Coulter today. What startles is that he took the opportunity to take a shot at Michael Moore, making him the leftist foil to Coulter. "Both are agile in their approach — Moore being the slickest of slick pseudo-documentarians, a foil to Coulter’s Don Rickles conservatism. Absolute and deliberate attack on the preciousness of political correctness is Coulter’s main game, and she plays it with vicious relish. Guileful shaping of documentaries lambasting capitalism, and posing as an outsized champion of the little guy is Moore’s self-assigned beat, one he’s walked to fame and fortune since Roger and Me.

It doesn’t take much courage to be Michael Moore. For a while anyway, he owned near hero status with the activist base (and some of the leadership) of the Democratic party. He charms the trendy minds of the glitterati. I dare say there’s a statue, complete with candles and incense, of Michael Moore in Sean Penn’s living room."... Read his column (here).

CARE PACKAGES - Did you know? I didn't.

Last week we sent a CARE PACKAGE to our daughter who is serving with the Army in Afghanistan. Describing the process in my previous Blog set me to thinking about the etymology of the term "Care package". I thought I knew, but some Google sniffing opened my eyes. I don't mean I read the wiki page for the term. I used Google news archive and followed the term back to its birth year - 1946.

If you were a Canadian child of the 1960s, the TV addicted generation, you probably have the broadcast pleas of the big box charities burned into your cranial circuitry. (I can scarcely repeat a joke heard last week, but I have a jukebox full of 40 year old jingles in my head.) I haven't seen the U.S.C. television spot for decades but I can still hear the halting voice of its founder and spokeswoman... "This is Dr. Lotta Hitschmanova of the Unitarian Service Committee, 56 Sparks Street, Ottawa 4" . I don't recall who spoke for C.A.R.E. but I do know that we all assumed that the "C" stood for Canadian, but we were wrong.
The original concept of the C.A.R.E. package was to folks to supplement the efforts of the Marshall Plan in Europe by directing a box of food directly to a relative in bombed out Europe. In 1948 a piece in the New York Times described the Marshall Plan itself as "an enormous CARE package", which indicates the usefulness of the term. The service was convenient. You sent C.A.R.E. the money (with an address of a needy family) and they tapped into the mountains of rations which the U.S. had shipped to European ports.

A photo of a 50 year old CARE Package, from the era of the Berlin Airlift.

In 1946 the Cooperative for American Remittance to Europe C.A.R.E. set up a tiny office in Ottawa - 73 Albert Street, which was still going strong in 1954, as you can read in the news clipping velow. By 1954 the stockpiles of wartime canned and dried foods were depleated and CARE - Canada was purchasing fresh stock from Canadian and U.S. suppliers. By that time the "E" in the acronym had been changed from "Europe" to include "Everywhere". In April 1955 CARE Canada stopped sending food packages to European destinations. Attention shifted to Asia and Africa.

For a CARE official to make a point of telling a news reporter that it was "strictly a new-commodity agency purchasing in bulk" leads me to believe that there was controversy at the time involving CARE's procurement practices.

I also find this comment interesting: "CARE's policy of sending overseas only new grade A quality materials has proved to be a psycholigically-sound policy..." I often think of the psychological impact of the charity my family and our neighbors received growing up in housing project in Saint John, N.B. in the 1960s. We never refused "second hand" anything and I remember everything about being needy. We kids would go to the church basement where used footwear was heaped on the floor, to try on boots till we had a match with our feet. I recall once a boy accusing me with "Hey, that was my coat." "No it's not." "Yes, and that pocket there is torn out. That's why my mom gave it away." He proceeded to prove it in front of his friends. I, rendered mute by the truth, had to stand there and let the donor have his moment.

C.A.R.E. stopped shipping CARE packages around 1964. Though we all use the term as a generic, the charity continues to renew the trademark. Plenty of charities which emerged from the World Wars and which once involved thousands of volunteers in labour intensive relief efforts, now simply solicit cash donations. They form the corp d'elite of international NGOs which we often see in the news.

Attention Vancouver Shoppers - John Candy and Michael Moore

Christmas shoppers are out in full force and some have that Don't mess with me! look. I find the best defensive posture is to restrict my reconnaissance of the major Burnaby shopping malls to early morning or well after dusk. It's not that we need that much to make me happy, but as a film buff I need to browse regularly. I find I must satisfy that itch at the back of the eyeballs and the only balm is a good movie.

As a newly minted documentary film maker I am keen to study the work of others. I constantly add to my library of non-fiction DVDs - an expensive genre to build in. Recently I stumbled on a cache of deleted titles in a store at Brentwood Mall in Burnaby. I scooped up ten DVDs including films by Errol Morris, Patrick Creadon, Michael Wilson, Marc Levin and others. My pick of the bunch is undoubtedly MICHAEL MOORE HATES AMERICA - a Mike Wilson film. The 95 minute feature is virtually unknown in Canada... Big Surprise eh!... and more is the pity. I love discussing good cinema but couldn't find anyone who'd seen it. A young friend at SFU film school told me today that he just couldn't get past the abrasive title. But the harsh title is integral to the story, and all is explained to the viewer. Even the elder statesman of Documentary film Albert Maysles approved, and his integrity is legendary.

Michael Moore Hates America - The title is provocative, the content eye opening, and the DVD now extremely affordable: $5 at WALMART and $6 at ZELLARS in the Vancouver area (very limited supply).

What Michael Wilson did was simple enough in concept - he chose to serve Mr. Moore a generous dose of his own medicine. Wilson made a study of every trick Moore employed in BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE and then he spent over a year following Moore's trail. The process of discovery exposes a pattern of outright fraud in Moore's technique and execution, but it is done with tact, wit and humour.

Don't fixate on the title. Wilson is not on a vendetta. He does however, mount an an assault for which there is no defence - and as a result Moore's production company went into lock down while Wilson was on the streets with a camera. Neither Moore or any his staff deigned to respond to an investigation of their film making tactics.
I emailed Michael Wilson to express my appreciation for his film and told him that MOST of Michael Moore's features have been broadcast by Canada's state owned television network - the CBC. I asked if his film had ever been broadcast in Canada. The answer was that it has never been broadcast ANYWHERE. And that, boys and girls, is morality tale in itself.

John Candy does a LIVE remote for CBC and entertains the shoppers at Brentwood Mall in Burnaby, B.C. It was Christmas 1976.

The comedy setup was to get some volunteers to gift wrap boxes, and then... well you know John. Out came the moose antlers, and much more. The six minute clip is an entertaining Blast from the past. Check it out at:

http://archives.cbc.ca/society/celebrations/clips/16149/

The CBC Archives website uses a software which prevents simple screen captures, so I used a digital SLR.

.

A CHRISTMAS CARE PACKAGE TO KANDAHAR

JUSTIN is one of the efficient volunteers staffing the Military Family Resource Center at C.F.B. Jericho Beach on West 4th. MFRC - BC offers support to hundreds of military families in Greater Vancouver.

Since our daughter deployed to Afghanistan our family has taken advantage of the free parcel service offered by the Canadian Forces. We sent our third "CARE PACKAGE" on Monday and are amazed that it has taken as little as twelve days for small boxes to be delivered to her at Kandahar Air Field. Damn that's efficient! I guess the term is now universal for boxes of goodies sent to loved ones, often students at university, far from home. I was reminded of the origin of the term yesterday when I was riffling through a fifty year old copy of AMAZING STORIES magazine. The old advert reads:

"CARE FOOD CRUSADE - $1.00 sends a 22-lb. Food Crusade package to the world's hungry through CARE, New York 16."

22 pounds of food delivered for a $1 donation! Today it costs one dollar & tax just to send a two page letter as far as New York!

Nien Cheng - my cherished hero, dead after a long, courageous life

Nien Cheng died on in Washington D.C. on November 2, and the world refused to take notice. I have been feeling a little bitter about that. My instinct is to hurl a few insults at the opinion makers and the navel gazers, but it wouldn't do any good. Nien was a cherished hero, and she was frequently in my thoughts. Though still a newcomer to documentary film, I would like one day to craft a fitting and lasting tribute.

It was actually April Lee of M.S.T.V. in Washington D.C., who informed me by email of Nien Cheng's passing. I am grateful for her kindness. My hero died at home, attended by loyal and loving friends, including Ms. Lee's mother. In an instant I did a Google news search. It was only two days after the death but I was astounded to see how scant was the news of a noteworthy death. I have waited a week for notices to accumulate, hoping to read some fresh anecdotes from her many admirers and friends. Sadly, my wait was in vain and it makes me a bit sour to see how many lazy flacks have gotten paid to plagiarize copy scraped from the web pages of two or three better newspapers.

Nien Cheng - the eyes of a tiger. Anger and a deep sense of outrage kept her alive through years of torture and close surveillance by the Maoists.

Her birth name was Yao Nien Yuan and she was endowed with beauty, intelligence and a work ethic. She became a graduate of the London School of Economics, where she met her husband to be, Dr. K.C. Cheng. She became a diplomats wife when he was appointed, in 1941, the Second Secretary at the Chinese Legation in Australia. It was in Australia that their only child was born, a daughter they named Meiping. Postwar the Cheng's returned to China and would make careers with Shell Oil. Their fatal mistake, one common to many intellectuals of that era, was to give the Communist Party the benefit of the doubt.

Like her contemporary George Orwell, (another great hero of mine), Nien Cheng early in life had chosen to become a committed socialist. And like Orwell she was destined to receive a brutal education at the hands of "comrades". Orwell was denounced and relentlessly screwed over by ankle biters, but Nien Cheng suffered more. She was tortured in a Shanghai prison - subjected to the most bestial forms of coercive interrogation yet devised, and for more than six years. Her torturers, by the dozen, were never prosecuted, but that's another dossier.

Nien Cheng with her beloved daughter Meiping, the budding actress who was murdered by Mao's Red Guards in 1967. [Washington Post photos]
After Madame Cheng was released from political prison, two extremely cold fish (members of a "Worker's Propaganda Team") appeared. Introducing themselves as spokesmen for the "Revolutionary Committee of the Shanghai Film Studio" they informed her that her daughter Meiping's name was on "the suicide list" at the studio, one of many actually murdered by Maoist Red Guards. "According to our Great Leader Chairman Mao, committing suicide is an attempt to resist reeducation and reform. It's a crime against Socialism." Much of the remainder of the book details Nien Cheng's tenacious hunt for the truth about her daughter's killers... another courageous blow for truth and justice by a heroic woman who simply could not be defeated by the black beast of authoritarianism.

The first line of Nien Cheng's memoir reads: "The past is forever with me and I remember it all." She has been a hero of mine since the first time I read her memoir - LIFE AND DEATH IN SHANGHAI (1986). I hope to read her inspiring book one last time before the clock strikes thirteen. You and I still have "that privilege", but for how long?

[I have shared thoughts on Nien Cheng a few times in the past, including one testy piece here in the blog. If you care to jump back two years, you can read the article here.]

Nien Cheng lived in Ottawa while waiting on the Americans to let her enter on her own terms. That's a story in itself. I see no evidence that any Canadian newspaper bothered to run her Obituary but at least a British paper, THE TELEGRAPH, mentioned the Canadian dimension to her story: