Month: October 2004

Hey Parliament!

Don’t make me vote again this year. I heard Harper say that his agenda was “frankly supported by the majority of Canadians” even though he got 29% of the vote in June. Nothing has changed. If you make us vote for you before the Liberals have done anything, you will see 5 seats in Quebec go to the Liberals, you will see a couple in Ontario go to the Liberals, you will see a few percentage points move NDP from Green and that will likely put the NDP into the low twenty seat range and, pooff, there goes Harper’s dreams of power. From today’s Toronto Star:

The Liberals were huddling last night to assess whether the raft of proposed changes would amount to a fundamental rewriting of the Martin government’s blueprint for minority rule. The choice rests with this shaky minority government to reject the changes as a threat or accept them, in whole or in part, which would in effect allow opposition parties to have a hand in designing the governing plan. A throne speech has only been successfully changed by the opposition twice in the history of the Canadian Parliament; in 1899 and in 1951, and the changes in both cases were minimal.
The vote on the Bloc gambit takes place later today, and if Government House Leader Tony Valeri judges the proposed changes to be a sharp shift in the Liberals’ chosen path, the Commons will be in a mad scramble around 6 p.m. as the three-month old government tries to hold on to its precarious control of Parliament. A loss by the Liberals in this case would amount to collapse of the Martin’s barely-begun government.

Don’t make us vote again, Mssrs Tory and Separatist alliance. All that you have shown in the last three months is that you two, the Alberta and Quebec independentistas, have much in common and that is the thing that most Canadians will agree upon.

Christmas Giving Idea

While reviewing my spelling issues in relation to the Washington Greys Grays post, I discovered the loveliness of this jersey for the Pittsburgh Keystones, a Negro League baseball team from the era of segregation of sports in the US. I am sure you will agree I deserve one – in XXL, please. They only played in 1887 and again in 1922, according to this list. I am not sure whether the shirt comes from the earlier or later period. The first date is fairly early in the racial division of the game which lasted from 1871 to 1947. The Pittsburgh Keystones came second in the 1888 “Colored Championships of America” after the Cuban Giants.

Channelling King


“Paaaul, Paaauuul – do you hear me?” [Ed.: insert your own scary ghost sounds here]

The CBC’s web site is running the most unattractive rather toady picture of the man who would be Prime Minister, minority leader Paul Martin this morning. He looks haunted by something…or someone. Could it be the news that the Tories are going to move amendments to today’s speech from the throne? Could it be that the ghost of MacKenzie King is whispering in his ear that he has blown it before it even began?

Registration Rush

While it is stupendously whacked that the mostestly freeest country in the world goes through a pre-registration of the prime freedom, the right to vote, it is heartening to find out there is a rush to register giving hope for a huge turnout that might actually reach the point of the majority of eligible voters actually exercising their franchise.

By the way, Ian tells it like it is from the trenches of voter turn out. If you are in the US, take his challenge whatever your political stripe and help mobilize the vote. Unless, of course, you are for local municipal totalitarianism or part of that “Fools for a Dictatorial Vermont” movement.

TV Violins

80s joke. Rosanne Rosannadanna: “never mind”.

Anyway, being couch bound with an unending cold recently, I have watched more TV than usual and have noticed an amazing increase, at least for me, in the violence on TV dramas. I suppose a bit part of it is that the violence is in the present. For the first chunck of this decade most US TV drama was about deadly events in the past, in the form of various detection and forensic shows such as the Law and Orders and the CISs and our own wee DaVinci’s Inquest. In two opening shows of this year, however, there has been an incredible level of present moment violence.

First, in the Third Watch opening show, the bassist from Kiss as bad criminal seeks revenge and sends machine gunning thugs out to kill and be killed all over “the city”. It was an hour of bullet spray without plot, going even into an ER, though, sadly, none of the character actually from the also unending ER were picked off. It was the sort of thing that I would have never thought would be on broadcast TV. Then, on Saturday night I watched bits of the opening show of Lost. Holy Freeg-holy! Repeated rehashing of the inside of a passenger jet full of people as it breaks up in flight (note to self: take the train), repeated showing of the results of said break up after the chunks land (ie “I see dead people”) and, then, people getting eaten by oversized and geographically misplaced carnivores – including one particularly blood-enriched consumption of an airline pilot through a window complete with chomping sounds and buckets of red paint being splashed back onto the neighbouring cockpit windows in time with the chomps. It is a potentially groundbreaking show having an actual original premise…oh, but the gore. Mixing Survivor with Edgar Rice Burroughs while riding the pop culture terror wave it could spawn a flood of copycat exotic pointless fear-mongering shows to kill off reality shows and cop shows and maybe Jamie Oliver for good measure.

I am not suggesting that these shows should be off TV or that you should not watch them. Maybe I have just been stuck watching a world of tedious home redecorating shows, wardrobe renovation shows, stuff storage renovation shows, dating life renovation shows…and sports for the last seven years and forgot how much blood is on TV if you want to find it.