Hallowe'en and other scary things

Hallowe'en approaches, and our gang has settled on masks and costumes. Well, almost. We have elected to go as the half-dozen hopefuls for the GOP presidential nomination. Our problem: everyone is fighting to go as Michelle Bachman. This is a switch on last year, when we were dressing up as Stephen Harper and his cabinet ministers. No one was willing to go as Tony Clement. Not even Tony Clement.

In literary news, Margaret Atwood, known to her old UBC colleagues as Peggy, has stated that she does not write "science fiction" (despite such other-worldly novels as "Oryx and Crake"). She writes, she says, "speculative fiction." Which means, we presume, that she writes stock prospectuses and IPOs. 

It has been reported that Canada's finance minister, Jim Flaherty, delivered in Ireland today what has been called a "blistering speech" attacking European governments for not dealing effectively with their financial crises. At the Dublin airport, Flaherty was divested of all his Euros and received a coded message from Prime Minister Harper saying, "Go easy on the Old Bushmills, Jim."