My year-end feature for CTV.ca is now available: Absurd moments in world politics.

I'm told it's very funny. Enjoy!

From the Washington Post:

The Afghan chieftain looked older than his 60-odd years, and his bearded face bore the creases of a man burdened with duties as tribal patriarch and husband to four younger women. His visitor, a CIA officer, saw an opportunity, and reached into his bag for a small gift.

Four blue pills. Viagra.

"Take one of these. You'll love it," the officer said. Compliments of Uncle Sam.

The enticement worked. The officer, who described the encounter, returned four days later to an enthusiastic reception. The grinning chief offered up a bonanza of information about Taliban movements and supply routes -- followed by a request for more pills.

For U.S. intelligence officials, this is how some crucial battles in Afghanistan are fought and won. While the CIA has a long history of buying information with cash, the growing Taliban insurgency has prompted the use of novel incentives and creative bargaining to gain support in some of the country's roughest neighborhoods, according to officials directly involved in such operations.

The winter solstice occurred in Canada at 7:04 a.m., which means the great turnaround can begin!

Here in Toronto, the sun rose this morning at 7:48 a.m. and will set at 4:44 p.m.

Way up in Edmonton, sunrise occurred at 8:48 a.m., with sundown at 4:16 p.m.

In a month or so, winter's psychological grip on me will be substantially broken. That's when I really start to notice the returning light. And now we're only three months from the equinox!

Christmas is nice, and I'm not intentionally downplaying its importance to Christians, but to me, the solstice is a more logical event around which to organize an early winter celebration.

Speaking of celebrations, at 6 p.m., the Kensington Market Festival of Lights gets underway!

Addenda

Some solstice-related reading:

CBC.ca: Winter Solstice: December's often-overlooked event

BBC: Winter solstice at Stonehenge (photo gallery; here's the news story)

BBC: Paganism - Winter solstice

Toronto Star: Reserve is a refuge from artificial light

The Star story is about the dark sky reserve at Torrance Barrens north of Orillia.

And speaking of light pollution therapy, I addressed the topic a few years back.

BlogTO had a post today on the impending demise of Pages bookstore at Queen St. W. and John.

The problem facing the bookstore is essentially this:

• The landlord wants to double the rent when the lease expires at the end of February
• Pages founder Marc Glassman has been looking for a new location for two years, to no avail
• "From Leslieville to Parkdale to St. Clair West, he's encountered landlords that he believes are asking way too much, and doesn't feel that even a reduced rent in any of those locations would necessarily make the business sustainable given their lower retail foot traffic compared to Queen and John"

If you can't stay and you can't move, you're in a bit of a conundrum.

As part of an article examining national identity and whether a country has brand name recognition in the United States, Aussie writer Clive James touches on the Great White.

Doug Saunders asks why Canada can't match the excellent street food of places such as Dhaka, Bangladesh, and speculates on how the points system for immigration may have crippled the development of such cuisine here.

Observe:

From the NYT:

In the early 1990s, while the cool kids in the New York University dorms were listening to Nirvana and Pavement and P. J. Harvey, Gabriel Roth, a Jewish teenager from California, sat in his dorm room, night after night, listening to one obscure James Brown record after another. He listened to “Dooley’s Junkyard Dogs,” a 45 that Brown cut in honor of a college-football team. He listened to Brown’s esoteric rock version of “Talkin’ Loud and Sayin’ Nothing.” He listened to “Gettin’ Down to It,” a collaboration between Brown and, as Roth puts it, “these white jazz guys — but it was really actually a cool record.” Mostly he listened to “Hot Pants,” an album that largely consisted of just one chord. It was like “some kind of strange calculus,” Roth told me recently. “Everybody playing one little note or one little beat. But the whole thing worked together.” Roth and a friend would sit in his dorm room and listen to “Hot Pants” for hours on end. They’d listen to one side of the album several times in a row, and then they’d turn it over and listen to the other side. “We would smoke weed and listen to the album,” he told me, “or not smoke weed and listen to the album.”

Fifteen years later, Roth is a 34-year-old songwriter, bassist and sound engineer, as well as the somewhat-reluctant co-owner of Daptone Records, a small record label in Brooklyn. He is still a musical outsider: he says he strongly dislikes almost every pop song recorded since 1974, including one or two that bear his own imprint. What appeals to him — what consumes him — are dusty soul and funk records from the 1960s and early ’70s. By studiously emulating these recordings, he has gained a reputation as a devoted, even obsessive, musical purist. In an age of MP3s and computer-generated sounds, he has distinguished himself by making vinyl records featuring actual musicians manipulating real-life instruments. He has rejected the music industry, and in doing so, he has aroused its interest.

Jean Leloup's 1990:

It bummed me out when I heard Groove Is In the Heart used in a Bell commercial, but here it is in its joyous, unsullied version:

And as a bonus, here's Groove Armada's I See You Baby (Fatboy Slim remix)