A Writer’s Allowed to Choose

A writer died, and due to a bureaucratic snafu in the hereafter, she was to be allowed to choose her own fate: heaven or hell for all eternity. Being very shrewd for a dead person, she asked St. Peter for a tour of both.

The first stop was hell, where she saw rows and rows of writers sitting chained to desks, in a room as hot as a thousand suns. Fire licked the writers’ fingers as they tried to work; demons whipped their backs with chains. Your typical hell scene.

“Wow, this is awful,” said the writer., appalled “Let’s see some heaven.”

In a moment, they were whisked to heaven and the writer saw rows and rows of writers chained to desks, in a room as hot as a thousand suns. Fire licked the writers’ fingers as they tried to work; demons whipped their backs with chains. It looked and smelled even worse than hell.

“What gives, Pete?” the writer asked. “This is worse than hell!”

“Yes,” St. Peter replied, “but here your work gets published.”

Harper accepts main Manley recommendations

OTTAWA – Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s plea for non-partisan civility on the way forward in Afghanistan was drowned out Monday by opposition accusations that the Conservatives deceived Parliament over their handling of Afghan detainees.

As he accepted the recommendations of the John Manley panel on Canada’s future involvement in Afghanistan – including some hard-hitting criticism at his own government – Harper asked Liberal Leader Stephane Dion to back his minority government on a vote of support for the mission in Parliament.

Harper pledged to lead a diplomatic offensive within NATO to wring 1,000 new troops for the embattled Kandahar region, saying the report’s recommendations give him “tremendous ammunition” to take to the alliance’s April leaders’ summit in Romania.

Bitter chill grips the Prairies

CALGARY — Some unenviable records have been set in recent days across the Prairies, where frighteningly frigid temperatures have settled for the remainder of the week.

A persistent Arctic ridge has sent temperatures tumbling well into the -40s – some 25 degrees below normal for this time of year – establishing new lows in communities across Alberta.

Meanwhile, the rest of the country is expected to get its fair share of winter’s wrath Wednesday. Environment Canada spent Tuesday issuing a slew of weather warnings, from Arctic outflows creating high winds and deep chills on British Columbia’s central coast, to freezing rain and heavy snowfalls wreaking havoc on the roads in Mary’s Harbour, Nfld.