I love living in Nifindlind!

OK, so to begin with: Larry King is a fucking moron. I'm sure we all knew this in some capacity or another, but tonight more or less sealed the deal. I would think that at the very least we should expect of veteran newscasters that they should be able to master basic pronounciation: "ou" is not pronounced as a short "i", nor is "a" -- ever! Now, I have been coached on the vagaries of how you say "Newfoundland," and spent many conversations correcting my mother when she said NewFOUNDland, and was myself chastised by a friend and colleague to pronounce the province's name along the same vowel sounds and cadence as UNDERSTAND. But it takes a particularly idiotic idiom to name the province as Larry King did this evening.

Of course, that only set the stage.

You know, when I was in grade two, seven or eight years of age, I saw images of cruel hunters clubbing cute baby seals and was outraged. I organized a protest and petition -- which did not reach outside my second grade classroom, but then I did not have quite the same professional connections I have today. Still, I was absolutely outraged at the sight of baby seals being killed, and absolutely earnest in my attempts to mobilize my fellow eight-year-olds.

I was eight years old. So what's Sir Paul McCartney's excuse for imbecillity?

Honestly, the man needs to get a job. And to divorce his idiot wife, who makes Yoko Ono look like a Rhodes Scholar by comparison.

I just finished watching, as many of you will have gleaned, Sir Paul's interview on Larry King Live vis a vis the seal hunt. To which our eminent Premier Mr. Danny Williams was the rebuttal witness. Sir Paul and his wife hoped that, in "bringing this amount of attention" to this event, they might bring pressure to bear on the Canadian government to end the seal hunt.

First: Heather, Sir Paul's wife, said of our new prime minister that "We've heard he's a very compassionate man." Um, OK. Seriously? Who told you that? I fear you are the object of a nasty hoax here, Heather ... I'm rather certain that the only reason Stephen Harper isn't out there clubbing baby seals himself is (a) his suddenly busy schedule, and (b) it would be a really bad photo op. He'll have to satisfy himself with strangling puppies at 24 Sussex. Off camera, of course.

Second: Heather is now officially the queen of hyperbole. She compared the seal hunt to, among other things, the killing of her own baby. Which in and of itself itself would be an excusably, if egregious, comparison, if she hadn't then attacked NL Premier Danny Williams for his entirely reasonable question to the McCartneys: i.e., you're attacking one form of subistence hunting, why aren't you making the same crusade against the hunting of white tail deer, of caribou, of the wholesale slaughter of cattle, pigs, and poultry? To which Lady Heather responded (again and again) that Danny what changing the subject.

No, you stupid bint, he really wasn't. He was raising the very real and relevant question of why you think baby seals are worth defending, and baby cows are not.

As ambivalent to my premier as I am, I have to say that he made a good show of it. He was measured and reasonable in the face of what was, for lack of a better word, a pretty damn shrill and strident opposition. Living in Newfoundland for all of seven months has made me aware of a number of issues facing this province, the whole seal hunt thing among them. And I've come to realize, much to the chagrin of my eight-year-old self, that the killing of baby seals constitutes a small fraction of the hunt -- smaller now then it was several decades ago, and ever shrinking. For those who watched the CNN special tonight: there was not a single clip of hunters clubbing baby seals. They were plying their brutal trade among the adults -- the reason being that the key point of the hunt is not the superciliousness of fur but the necessity of food. We're not talking about the selling of pelts to fashionistas in Milan, we're talking abour Flipper Pie -- a Newfie delicacy I have yet to partake of. We're talking about what happens in the fishing inudstry off season.

(As an aside: the premier of our province was interviewed tonight on American TV, and Larry King called him "Danny," as opposed to "Mr. Premier." Now, I can imagine that this was likely a strategy of Danny's media people, or possibly Danny himself, in the interests of maintaining his folksy persona, but I ask you: on CNN, is this how we want to play cricket? Dammit, he should have been "Mr. Premier").

I should point out: I'm hardly a candidate to go out on the floes clubbing seals, but I do recognize that our relatiomship with the natural world is way too complicated to let everything be. One of Danny's (Mr. Premier's) points is that the seal population has tripled in the last decade or so ... leaving them be would mean they would exterminate themselves as they depleted their food sources. Which brings us back to the observation that before Sir Paul and Lady Heather go after the seal hunt, they should perhaps protest hunts of deer designed to cull a population already artifically maintained by a human presence.

In the end, what I find most ironic about this affair is that the original excusion Sir Paul and Lady Heather took to find a photogenic seal cub took longer than expected because there were very few ice floes on which a helicopter could alight. That's right: the ice floes were few and far between this year. Hmm. Perhaps, rather than baby seals, do you not think there is a greater issue to throw your celebrity behind, Sir Paul? Global warming, perhaps?