What's in a name?

As I was opening the laptop this afternoon, the radio announcer mentioned the name of the performers on a pop ballad he was about to play. I was struck by the name of the musical group, The New Pornographers. Other seemingly successful pop groups include The Bare-Naked Ladies, The Wailing Jennies, and several other names guaranteed to annoy or at least irritate staid middle aged or elderly folk like me. At least one is unprintable, or anyway I'm too delicate, too conscious of my readers' sensibilities, to have any wish to spell it out here. But I wish I was thinking of starting a pop group, because I can think of a few names as likely to cause offence as these existing Canadian pop groups. What about pop groups called The Prolapsed Piles, or The Anal Warts, or The Urethral Discharge? I hereby offer these free, no copyright, to anyone interested. In case anybody wonders why I had the radio tuned to the station that dispenses what passes for music purveyed by extant pop groups, it wasn't because I like that kind of music (if music is the right word to describe the jangling cacophony which assaulted my eardrums) but because the news and weather report were about to be broadcast. Like all Canadians, I'm morbidly curious about the weather, especially at this time of the year. Yesterday the temperature was 15 C, but overnight a cold arctic front came through, dragging the temperature down to minus 14 C and today with a brisk north wind, it hasn't got above zero. But in this month of March that usually can be relied upon to unleash at least one full-strength blizzard, we have so far had no snow whatsoever, and if the long-range forecast is correct, we will establish yet another weather record, a March without snow. Indeed we've had very little snow this winter, and for a long period -- two weeks or more -- we had temperatures 10 degrees C or more above the average of the past 100 years. That is yet another rather convincing sign of climate change. It's going to be more difficult in future to get any details on some aspects of the weather that afflicts this part of the world. Our federal government, climate change deniers all, are going to extraordinary lengths to keep the information from us: in the latest budget, no money is allocated to Arctic Weather Research stations that have been operating since the 1930s; and all scientific staff in the relevant department (Environment Canada) have been forbidden to speak to the media, publish scientific papers without prior approval by a political appointee in the department, or present papers at conferences of their scientific peers; they are not even allowed to attend such meetings at their own expense. This unconscionable stifling of science goes further than any of the excesses perpetrated by political appointees in the corresponding US government departments under the Bush administration. It's true that the present Canadian government is run by (and for) a group of people with intimate ties to the oil and gas industry; but I wonder what they think they can accomplish by stifling scientific data. Of course they are the same people who proclaim the great new Canadian initiative on the health of women and children in developing countries, an initiative that totally excludes all mention of family planning and contraception. The woman minister who is the spokesman for this initiative genuinely seems to believe that providing clean water is the only action necessary to prevent the half million deaths annually from causes related to childbirth. The largest single group of these are deaths due to septic abortions. But like erratic weather attributable to global climate change, our government seems to think that if they don't acknowledge the existence of the problem of these maternal deaths, they will somehow or other, just disappear. The party in power was formerly called the Progressive Conservative Party; but that word 'progressive' was too dangerous for the people now running that party, so it was dropped. Maybe the most obscene name for a new pop group would be The Conservative Party of Canada.