Month: January 2004

World Upside Down

Just watched Bill Maher on Larry King and heard the extraordinary statement from Maher – unchallenged by King – that on 9/11 President Bush’s father was having breakfast with Osama’s Dad. Is that right? The connections between the Bush’s and the Saudi rich are well documented and the spiriting of many of them out of the USA soon after the attacks a simple fact. If it is true, however, that they were having breakfast, it is amazing that this is not well known. If it was the case in the previous presidency, it would have been something you would never have heard the end of from Limbaugh or Brudnoy. Imagine Churchill’s Pappy having a snack with Adolf’s Dad in September 1939. We’d know. Michael will tell me if it is untrue.

In other mindboggling news I learned about today, I saw this story on local North Country NY TV news this evening:

St. Lawrence County’s Amish community can open the curtains once again. A Gouverneur man is behind bars, charged with public lewdness for allegedly flashing Amish households.

St. Lawrence County sheriffs investigators say 24 year old Timothy J. Thomas would park in front of Amish houses along County Route 10 in the Heuvelton area, jump out of his vehicle naked, flash the Amish, then calmly return to his vehicle and continue on to work. Investigators say Thomas is suspected of a number of such incidents but January 16th is when he pulled it off again, leading to his arrest.

Weather records for January 16th show the temperature that day hovered around zero, meaning Thomas risked exposing his extremities to frostbite by the time he hot-footed it back to his car. Thomas, of State Rt. 58 in Gouverneur was arraigned today on the misdemeanor count and jailed in lieu of $1,000 cash bail or $2,000 bond. Investigators say he may have targeted Amish houses because of their lack of phone service to summon authorities.

So much so wrong with the whole plan – let alone the journalists’ idea that being entirely naked is “flashing”. Why bother the Amish? There is actually a history of attacks on them [which they do not report on principle] despite theirs being a society of consent – even if unlike your average life at the mall.

The Carnival of Canada’s Prize for Week Seven

When I walk by all I can hear is shouts of 'crouch', 'flashbang', 'spray the room!!!' over and over...

In addition to my best picks post for this my week as editor of Carnival of Canucks, I am awarding a prize, a sort of lifetime achievement medallion. It is not going to a person. It is not for a blog. The winner of the first weekly award of merit [and perhaps the last unless the next editors pick it up and run with it] is this somewhat unassuming building in Charlottetown PEI where 12 or so people work and 8 or so blogs are maintained. It is the home of two small web application and design firms, silverorange Inc. and Reinvented Corp. – or something like that. At the moment the following blogs are being updated on a fairly regular basis:

  • Acts of Volition: this blog covers web news, pop culture and attracts an amazing volume of readers – when Steve posted petition on a bit of a whim, he got over a thousand responses. When he points out design issues in some web products, the creators sometimes pipe up. He has also started Acts of Volition Radio. Update: they are even talking about Steve this thursday at the Berkman Bloggers Meet.
  • CEO Blues: Dan has been on the longest Outward Bound trip in history which has apparently lasted for months up a glacier in BC. He is currently on Day 19 of 21 and, in finding himself, has found himself stinky and mouse infested. It’s time to come home.
  • Delta Tango Bravo: Daniel has a gift for the superlative and likes to write about things that strike his taste – paintings, film, archetecture. His taste is good and his white on black design natty.
  • newrecruit.org: Stephen runs an on-line hockey web site, talks about web news and posted the best post about advent of winter I have ever seen – important for any award of merit in Canada.
  • Reinvented: run by my fifth cousin-in-law, Peter has a run the site since May 1999 and, while it started as a business web site for business news without only 13 posts in 1999, it has evolved and for years been a blog where a discussion can get started and go off in any direction. Update: and when he gets a head of steam, he can get quite specifically upset. Good post.
  • Silverorange Labs: Stuff for web application brainiacs. I don’t get much of it. But that’s me. If you are a web
    design brainiac read it. Free code here. Is that like saying “free beer tonight” for the rest of the world?
  • Reinvented Labs: Ditto but more for the Linux and Mac stuff…I think. Unlike the guys at silverorange, Ruk is pretty much a one man show on the tech end and explains things from start to finish.
  • Reinvented World: The Rukster’s truest recent obsession are travel books. He most recently reviews a book about a trip in 1950 across the Atlantic in a modified jeep. Scans of gatefold maps a plenty. If you ever, like Pete, have dreamed of having rich pals called Nigel and Geoffery Hyphenated-Name who invite you to tag along in a queue of Land Rovers crossing Bolivia, this place is for you.

Amazing. One red building in a small town Canada and eight views of the world. Oops, forgot one thing. They ran a conference last fall that attracted Dave Winer out of the blue and which also had a blog, too. Nine. Maybe there are more hidden there that I don’t know about.

The Barachois is Claimed!

I used to live a walk from the sand bar – or barachois in Acadian French – near North Rustico, PEI which is now being claimed by someone as ownable land. Funny until you remember the bit that is not covered by the tides twice a day is a nesting site for rare plovers. Thank God we can rest easy knowing the top guns are on the case:

Lewie Creed is the deputy minister and says something will be done, he just hasn’t decided yet what that will be.

Beautiful. I have found this handy map and I think the area in question is that identified as “Dune Bar” above Anglo Rustico – that is the bit known locally as the barachois.

It is interesting to note the absence of South Rustico on the map as well as Rusticoville (not to mention Rustico Cross but we won’t get into that one) and the Hunter River is known as the Clyde River at that point of the flow. Hence the name Hunter-Clyde Watershed Group. Hunter River PEI and Hunter Valley Australia, home of plumy reasonably priced red wines, share a common history in that the same group settled each area and one named itself after the other (but I can’t recall which way it went).

The Seventh Carnival of the Canucks

I've waited so long for Al

This is it.  Up a little early but still my kick at the can. I knew it was big time when I saw the notice earlier today, Monday, at BlogsCanada. So in this my edition – 007– of the Carvinal of Canucks, I would like to share some links to great blogs by and about people not where they might be as well as some of my thoughts on blogging. Why dislocation? I have been a little dislocated for most of my life but only in the most banal ways of no real interest to others. As a kid, my Scots immigrant parents dressed us up in identical Marks & Sparks shorts and sent us off into new elementary school, a living hell in Sydney Mines, Cape Breton, after the first big move from Mississauga. MacDonalds of various genetic strains took turns giving me and my brothers fat lips. So I have a soft spot for the dislocated.  Right under the nose.

The first of my daily reads is Michael Demmons, a Newf’ who has lived in Atlanta, Georgia for five years and was himself a host of the Carnival of Canucks a few weeks ago. His web siteDiscount Blogger presents the view of a Canadian in the USA, a gay man in a fairly intolerant times and a libertarian in a world of sheep. The best thing about the place is the great debate by people with a firm understanding of their positions combined with a welcome for civilized disagreement – even allowing anyone respecting the rules to post on Sundays. While posts are largely about US politics, he admits his outsider perspective when giving a position. He is moving up into the dreaded A-list zone but hopes are high that he will maintain his edge.

Having moved in another direction is my number two and another great site for debates from a North Country New Yorker living for years in little old PEI. One of the oldest of the old school techies I know, Humblebub cares little for gurus, usability consultants and lawyers. Especially lawyers. His site is largely a homebrewed mix of local provincial politics, web techie news, and by times rude observations on life. Today haiku broke out. His recent recollections about members of the older generations of his family from the counties around Adirondack State Park are his best writings yet.

My third site of the dislocated is not a place for debate but for a view of Canada’s national capital through a recent arrival from the Maritimes. Lana’s photo blog’s, called Place and Thyme, gets my attention with its clean design and views of a winter in Ottawa, where wind chills of minus 40 are not uncommon this time of year.

Fourth is Ghost of a Flea from Toronto by a UK archeologist author has an alarming amalgam of news items from digs and sites around the world combined with something of an inexplicable fixation for Kylie Minogue, who rates for me somewhere around Princess Anne on the sweetie scale.

Fifth comes the most important blogging Canuck, Dean Allen, Industrialist, in France. I understand I owe my referral log code to him and thank him for the joy that brings as well his interest in the life of another dislocated Canuck, Big Connie Black.

A couple CBC types with interesting if intermittent blogs rank sixth and seventh: Matt Rainnie, host of the drive home show on CBC Charlottetown and Donna the Existential Dishwasher who works with CBC Winnipeg, both formerly of Halifax. I don’t know if Matt takes his Guinness (vitamin G) but it seems a constant in Donna’s mobile life.

A few sites for me best express what it might be to be mid-twenties feeling out of place and time in the early 21st century. My eighth place blog is run by Mandy who regrets missing Duran Duran by 20 years. Phillip Clark of Halifax, my number nine, is burning the candle at both ends in what appears to be a couple of bands while clubs all around him are shutting down. A recent bar crawl post was both alarming and too familiar. [I just can’t figure out what a pub crawl with him and the Accordian Guy would be like…except everyone’s favorite organic chemical in black liquid form would be involved.]

Number ten – Chumptastic – writes about the bar band fan’s life in Kingston Ontario or the road to Peterborough most weekends and is an important source of Sarah Harmer location around the town.

Recent celebrations for his PR card and life in the cold of Canada are some of the topics atArthur about a lad from the Netherlands landed in Halifax. Where else can you find out aboutpre-sliced packaged apples.

A bluenoser in Montreal ranks my twelfth: Blork writes about what was for dinner, jobs he has held and posts photos about winter in Montreal. I hate the Habs but love the city.

Unlucky thirteenth, last and frankly least is the #1 Dead Blog I Want Revived. Anton North, a guy from Northern Ontario who in 2003 was working in Iqaluit, Baffin Island which is about a couple thousand kms north of here. Too many blogs are about the same topics little understood and analyzed incorrectly. If blogs are to be useful at all it is to put you in touch with someone else whose life you will never live, who you may never meet. You thrive on hubs in this stuff, folks who will link to you or post replies when you suck. Blogs like Anton’s die from a lack of a hub more than anything. Go find new writers – who don’t write about Iraq, rss or one of the other 14 swell topics filling 98% of blogspace – and add them to your hub.

Well that is it. Canadians on the move and writing about where they find themselves. Tomorrow – who knows? Maybe more. Right now kids gotta bath and me gotta snooze.

Movies as a Problem

I have a strange relationship with movies. Until I was about nineteen I went
once or twice a week with my buddies in Truro as an entertainment. Then I worked
for a few years as an usher at a playhouse in Halifax where I would watch the
same play ten to twenty times in a few weeks and all of a sudden I found my
ability to suspend my disbelief entirely gone. I would go to the movies and find
myself sitting in a room with 200 strangers aimed at a wall where images
flashed. It could be a classic at Wormwood’s Dog and Monkey Theater or the
latest crap staring Molly Ringwald – no good: the arse was truly out of it. I
couldn’t get out of my head that people were paying to get emotionally jerked
around collectively. And so much of the experience of crisis, dramatic and often
violent events never experiencable by average folk. Surely something must stick
and displace parts of reality. The only movies I found as I got older that I
could not suffer this trauma were movies I saw before I had this experience or
movies that were so moronic, like The
Wedding Singer, that it didn’t matter – the point being that you were
supposed to giggle out loud to the point that you were aware of acting stupidly
in front of strangers. It all reminded me of Plato’s ban on fiction nicely
summarized here:

Ironically, Plato was no defender of liberty. In his
Republic, Plato states that in an ideal state, all fables would be censored to
protect the minds of the youth. Censors would reject and prohibit tales they
considered to be bad or misleading. Mothers and nurses would be permitted to
read only fables authorized by the republic. In this utopian state, Plato would
also censor those plays and other works which tell untruths of the gods. He
believed the only function of art was to aid in education and believed very
strongly what might be harmful to the young should be prohibited.

I
am not saying we should have censorship but certainly sympathize with the old
toga man. The pre-eminant role of “being entertained” as a principle of a free
and democractic populace then began to trouble. Like military expenditures on
nuclear warheads, money wasted on half of our entertainment could surely solve
37% of our country’s ills.

The condition may be passing as I enjoyed a normal healthy adult relationship
with Master
and Commander one weekend before Christmas and last night I watched a piece
of 1998 global fear schlock, Deep Impact [now in a way
caught in a pre-September 11th and even a pre-LOTR stasis (Ed.: as illustrated)] So I drag my ass all the way into Mordor only to have it flatted by a frickin' comet!?!?! and, afterwards, suffered the obligatory
night of wondering how far a killer wave caused by a comet hitting the north
Atlantic would reach inland up the St. Lawrence. An appropriate response, I
assume – the safe but realistic experience of fear for my safety and that of my
young children. Slightly bothered sleep. Glad to be back on board as one of the
entertainable, I guess.

“Western Alienization”

That is apparently what Belinda Stronach said.    Far be it from me to criticize a person misspeaking but if we wanted a Prime Minister who cannot speak a national language why didn’t we just keep Chretien who, after all, knew something about government before he got the position. Bels Strons, it appears, is looking like the new Stockwell Day already. She may also have a Deanish temper:

Stronach had blunter words yesterday about some of the media coverage of her campaign, saying she should be judged on her policies, not her appearance. Media focus on her hair, wardrobe and personal life sends the wrong message at a time when more women should be drawn to politics, she told reporters at an Ontario Progressive Conservative policy convention in Niagara Falls.

While this is true, what I think we are seeing is a corporate CEO who wants to be treated like one off the job – don’t analyze, don’t expect to be told and for God’s sake don’t presume that anything being done is your business. Front runner Harper to me has this nasty streak as well. What the Conservative Reform Alliance Progressives stand for appears to be this:

  • Alberta ought to be treated like a part of the country that more than about 10% of the population
  • Whatever is being done, do the opposite
  • Is it not the place of the press or ordinary taxpayers to question

The National Post, of course, plays it differently from The Toronto Star but still can only focus on the clothes, the supposed greater interest in her speech compared to a David Bowie concert and the apparent need to determine only if she is “sexy”. What an odd and depressing thing that overused adjective does. I remember George Grant in an undergrad class going off on a small rant twenty years ago on the sexification of society, making such questions sadly inevitable. It almost makes me sympathetic as I watch the wheels coming off so early in a foolhardy campaign – and one, really, only given credibility in the hope of creating some facade of a leadership race to justify what is more and more clearly the final defeat of the Progressive Conservatives by the Alliance.