Black Dot Diary

Hello every­one, I am so new to Word­press that I acci­den­tally “cut” a blog post that was gen­er­at­ing some inter­est: “Canada & BC Arts Cuts: Deep Insult, Shal­low Think­ing,” first posted on Octo­ber 10^th, 2009. I have to say there’s a strange les­son in cut­ting this blog — when you cut some­thing that is a unique cre­ation of an indi­vid­ual, you often can never get it back. You can’t unring a bell. Les­son learned for me. If only the Harper and Camp­bell gov­ern­ments would learn the same thing about cut­ting the arts. Their cuts have far more dire con­se­quences than the mere dele­tion of a blog. Below is my attempt to recre­ate what I had written:

This morn­ing Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Lal­ib­erté boarded the Inter­na­tional Space Sta­tion and con­ducted a news con­fer­ence wear­ing his trade­mark red clown nose.

Lal­ib­erté made the two-​day jour­ney in a Russ­ian Soyuz craft along with Russ­ian cos­mo­naut Maxim Surayev and U.S. astro­naut Jef­frey Williams. The space sta­tion is 350 kilo­me­tres above the Earth.

I always wanted to go to space. I remem­ber watch­ing the TV as Neil Arm­strong and Buzz Aldrin made that first moon land­ing in 1969. I told every­one that I wanted to be an astro­naut with NASA. I never did reach my goal but some­times when I’m look­ing up at the stars, I imag­ine what it must be like to be out there gaz­ing back at the Earth as Aldrin and Arm­strong did 40 years ago.