“Finnish community artists Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen, 35, and Tellervo Kalleinen, 32, came up with the idea three years ago... the Finnish word valituskuoro... translates into ‘complaints choir’ and refers to people complaining in packs... ‘And then we got excited about this term and said, “Hey this would be really funny to make a real complaints choir”’ that sings about their gripes, said Mr. Kochta-Kalleinen.... they were able to test out the idea in Birmingham, England, where they were invited for a two-week artists’ residency... ‘Then we heard complaints that Birmingham was a very ugly city ... and we thought if it’s so ugly then it’s the perfect place to start a complaints choir.’ So they did…. People who answered the call for choir members came up with a dizzying variety of complaints – from the personal to the political. Selections were edited down and then a local musician was called in to put the gripes to an original score. The Birmingham choir had two successful performances, one in a local hall and another on the street. The second gig culminated in a celebration at a pub where the choir did an impromptu performance griping about the price of the beer – but to no avail. After the success of the Birmingham choir, groups formed in places such as Helsinki, St. Petersburg, Hamburg and Melbourne.... There is now a website (http://complaintschoir.org) telling people how to set up their own choirs. So what’s the most unusual complaint that Mr. Kochta-Kalleinen has heard? ‘In Finland we had a woman who complained that her dreams are boring,’ he recalled.”

Globe & Mail November 14, 2007

“Now if you are going to win any battle, you have to do one thing. You have to make the mind run the body. Never let the body tell the mind what to do. The body will always give up. It is always tired morning, noon and night. But the body is never tired if the mind is not tired … You’ve always got to make the mind take over and keep going.”

“George S. Patton, general” quoted by Donna Jacobs “Monday Morning” in Ottawa Citizen October 2, 2006

“Blasphemy depends upon belief, and is fading with it. If any one doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor. I think his family will find him at the end of the day in a state of some exhaustion.”

G.K. Chesterton in “Introductory Remarks” in Heretics quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 17 #5 (March-April 2014)

In my latest Loonie Politics column I say the new government-funded recommendation to have at most two drinks a week is a weird triumph of the hypochondriac and the control freak at a time when the cost of panicky COVID lockdowns increasingly demonstrates that they should not be in charge of anything important.

“All this shows how much luck there is in human affairs, and how little we should worry about anything except doing our best.”

Winston Churchill The Hinge of Fate [with respect to Parliament not turning on him in the dark period]

“there it stretched away into the grey haze of London, really beautiful, this vast hive of men and women who had learned at least the primary lesson of the gospel, that there was no God but man, no priest, but the politician, no prophet, but the schoolmaster.”

The internal monologue of politician Oliver Brand in Robert Hugh Benson Lord of the World

“The most essential educational product is Imagination…. The child who can see the pictures in the fire will need less to see the pictures on the film…. So long as the minds of the poor were perpetually stirred and enlivened by ghost-stories, fairy-stories and legends of wild and wonderful things, they remained comparatively contented; possibly too contented, but still contented. The moment modern science and instruction stopped all these things, we had a Labour Question and the huge discontent of today… dull people always want excitement.”

“The True Victorian Hypocrisy,” in G.K. Chesterton Brave New Family

“Boredom can literally kill you, according to an excellent new little book on the subject, published this week… Lars Svendsen, author of A Philosophy of Boredom... was inspired to write the book by a friend who killed himself out of boredom, and Mr. Svendsen shows how boredom, or the escape from boredom, is a much greater incitement to action than is excitement. People get drunk out of boredom; people give up reading newspaper articles such as this one out of boredom; people contract unwise sexual encounters out of boredom. But the dreadful thing is that even sex ends up boring, according to Mr. Svendsen. There is, in fact, a psychological term for it, he says: taedium sexualitatis.... Humans seem to be unfairly picked out for boredom, as we are for drunkenness and suicide, lemmings notwithstanding. Animals, medical studies apparently show, can be understimulated, but not bored. And, even worse, modern humans seem to be particularly prey … The word ‘boring’ in the dreary sense, as opposed to the drilling water pipes sense was used for the first time in England only in the 1760s. That’s not to say that people weren’t bored before 1760, just that there was a European explosion of boredom at about that time. The Germans invented their word for boredom, Langeweile, at the same time. And it was only with late-18th-century Romanticism that the demand got going for life to be interesting. The obsession has boomed ever since. Nowadays, it is hard to think of a time when one is not subject to at least one of the four types … Mr. Svendsen comes up with: boredom of situation, such as being trapped on a train without a book; boredom of satiety, when you have too much of a good thing; existential boredom, where you’ve just had enough of the world; and creative boredom, when you’re forced to come up with something new such as, say, an interesting item in a newspaper article.”

An author whose name I did not record in the Ottawa Citizen March 12, 2005