Free Fifty Shades of Black by Arthur Black Page B

Parks staff has draped the damaged trunks with narrow-gauge chicken wire to discourage further demolition, but a lot of people are upset at the prospect of a park being flooded and clear-cut by a work crew of non-tax-paying aliens operating without a permit.
    Which is ironic, because a human work crew with all the requisite permits recently clear-cut a swatch of forest just outside the park boundary, including by my count, at least thirty mature cedar and fir, which still lie a-mouldering on what’s left of the forest floor.
    But THAT clear-cut is legal and above board—even if it did do ten times the damage that a beaver colony could ever do.
    And of course, the beavers aren’t the aliens—we are. But being polite and quintessentially Canadian beavers, they’d never be so rude as to point that out.
    I remain hopeful. I know it will take at least six months for Salt Springers to agree on ANY course of action vis-à-vis the beavers. In the meantime another couple of unlicensed aliens are prowling our forests—a pair of mature cougars. Cougars don’t pay taxes either, but unlike beaver, they’re not vegetarian.
    I think if we just step back for once and leave it to Mother Nature . . . it might all work out.

 
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    To Beard or Not to Beard
    T here was a big photo of Thomas Mulcair on the cover of Maclean’s magazine recently. STEPHEN HARPER HAS FINALLY MET HIS MATCH, the headline blared, in the magazine’s trademark, understated, feces-disturbing way. The cover story mentions Mulcair’s assets—a whip-sharp mind, a fast mouth and the disposition of a pit bull with ulcers. But what really separates the man from the guy who lives at 24 Sussex?
    A beard.
    The face fur separates Mulcair from just about every politician in Canada. It’s an unspoken law, but a law nonetheless: if you’re a man and you’re running for office, your chops better be bare as a baby’s backside. Voters, they say, won’t trust a man with a beard.
    Downright stupid, really. Jesus is always depicted with a beard. Abe Lincoln had a beard. Santa Claus has a beard.
    Still, there have been a few bearded guys who did nothing to promote the brand. Taliban and al Qaeda lunatics wear beards. Saddam Hussein, when they hauled him out of his rat hole, sported a beard that resembled the south end of a northbound goat. Photographs of Karl Marx show a man who seems to be thrusting his face through a dehydrated hedge.
    Marx looked like a choirboy compared to a seventeenth-century pirate named Edward Teach. A contemporary wrote that Teach was known by “that large Quantity of Hair, which, like a frightful Meteor, covered his whole Face, and frightened America more than any Comet that has appeared there in a long Time. This Beard was black, which he suffered to grow of an extravagant Length; as to Breadth, it came up to his Eyes; he was accustomed to twist it with Ribbons, in small Tails . . . and turn them about his Ears.”
    Teach was better known by his nickname, “Blackbeard.”
    Bearded bad guys are a relative rarity these days. Lots of popular figures—Brad Pitt, David Beckham, Johnny Depp—flirt with facial hair all the time. Even baby-faced Prince William grows a beard now and again—and looks much better for it.
    Nevertheless beardophobia still thrives. Our armed forces take a dim view of any recruit who shows up with a beard. How to Get a Job manuals and Miss Manners columns invariably recommend a “clean-shaven” look.
    Even my sainted mother went to her reward tsk-tsking and tut-tutting about her wayward eldest son and his unshorn mug. “No woman is ever going to want to kiss that,” she told me. Often.
    Sorry Mom, but you were dead wrong on this one. As soon as I could, I grew myself a beard. Not for me the Vandyke, the French Fork or the Mutton Chops. Fie on the Chinstrap, the Soul Patch or the Goatee. I grew myself the Full