Ranting about rants

Y'know, I never liked the Rant Line™ portion of the Mirror, so I never read it. A section devoted to hearing complaints from readers about how "there is no music scene" or "how dare you complain about the band that I love" is hardly entertaining or informative reading.

But my attention was drawn to it when my girlfriend read one submission out loud to me: "This message is for that PUNK kid who left a message last week about Rek Shop and said that maybe some of the lyrics were wack. Alright, kid, call back next week and LEAVE YOUR NAME and the whole fuckin' Rek Shop posse will battle you! You can have any beat you want, guy, and you'll fuckin' get slayed to death! Destroyed! Your mama is sooooo fat... Peace." Now that's entertainment! Do all messages left on the Rant Line get published, or are Al South and Roger Argent sitting on a beach somewhere while a $5/hour kid transcribes just enough to fill two columns?

Are death threats considered entertaining to the staff at the Mirror? What the hell is wrong with you? Would this have been published if Al or Roger were the objects of these threats? What exactly do they edit?

--Cliff B.

(Ed's investigation: Roger Argent was, in fact, on a beach somewhere and was unavailable for comment. Al South was located in a bar, and said thanks for the $5/hour-kid idea.)

Animal sacrifices

Since the '30s, I've been reading accounts similar to Jacquie Charlton's article on disappearing pets ["Pets in peril!", cover, June 11]. They're all battle reports in the silent war between subscribers to the philosophy that only MY pain matters, and those with the opposing belief that the pain of ALL sentient beings matters, with supporters spread between the two extremes.

The February 1939 Reader's Digest gives an account, from Alexander's Medieval Animal Trials, of a pig tried for killing an infant in Falaise, France, in 1386. Upon sentencing, the condemned was dressed in human clothing, whipped, maimed, and beheaded. In his Medieval Panorama, Coulton, writing of the England's Forest Laws in the 1300s, says that the poacher's dog, if caught, would be condemned to lose one foot to ensure his uselessness to his poacher-master.

A few years ago, an astute Quebec minister invited animal-rights advocates and commercial and research groups profiting from the use of animals to a meeting in Montreal. When one humane society inspector was leaving one of the sessions, an alert news reporter asked if it was true that she had to promise not to tell anything of what she saw in research labs. Her answer was a meaningful "yes." Presumably, her only recourse in an instance of abuse would be to plead within the offending lab!

After bombs were discovered outside the Laval and Montreal buildings of a pharmaceutical company, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service announced it would investigate People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. The interest of CSIS--part of the federal justice department--in the activities of PETA, an international non-profit animal protection organization, is a strong assurance to the labs using animals that governments will permit no interference from outside or inside their labs. Six centuries after animals were maimed in the name of justice, our modern justice protects those who maim them for the sake of money; naturally, the public justification is "the good of mankind"!

--Harold V. Murphy

Use the Web to sell art

The Mirror organization has crafted perhaps the most user-friendly and bad-server-proof Web site out there. If you have ever used any one of thousands of industrial supplier or even media industry Web sites, it takes a mind-twistingly long time for even their simple images to load.

As you are so adept at this, I wish you would set up an online art gallery to display the tons of graphic and tactile art produced in Montreal. Some online galleries feature stupendously, suicide-inducingly horrible work going for new-car prices. It makes me want to grab a set of kid's watercolours and go to it.

Why not? Sell Montreal art for Montreal artists direct so that they don't have to work for burger-flipping wages in machine-gun-waving, cocaine-gangster-ridden Florida for Adolf Disney. (A blonde, repeat, blonde Hercules image still lurks in the corridors of nightmare creatures in my mind. There is some cognitive dissonance here, folks. When was the last time these guys went to a Greek restaurant?) Quebec artists are an oppressed minority: they make the best animated features cell by cell (!) to support the worst plot lines under sweatshop conditions.

--Walt O'Brien