if you can't stand the heat...

After the bombs fell on Japan, there remained, on certain walls, the burned in shadow of people who had been standing there when the flash hit. These shadows remained for years, decades even, after the people who cast them had been disintegrated.

This graffito has been showing up here and there around my neighbourhood. A silhouette of a defiant pot banger, all black but for a red square on the sleeve. These are likely to remain long after the casserole phenomenon is gone. I know the artist was thinking Banksy, but I can't help thinking about the atomic massacres in Hiroshima and Nagasaki--they were the starting gun for the Cold War and for the championship of unfettered capitalism that has nearly choked this planet to death.

I counted nine people passing my house today with their casseroles. Real diehards, I guess, with pots that looked like they'd been dropped out of the airplane along with the A bombs; pots battered for nearly four weeks straight now. Nine pots can still make quite a racket.

The casserole thing was fun. Tactics shift. I notice that Charest's earnest efforts to suppress the corruption probe are making the front page now. Voters will probably be a lot less ambiguous about this than they were about the students. Jean Charest may find the heat so great that he wishes he were back in the kitchen, amid the clattering of the crockery that overshadowed his croockery.