Month: March 2005

Referral Spam Break

Just like that. It stopped at 3:57 pm today. It’s like a three-day storm breaking and the house getting quiet. I can actually see real referrals now like this one linking to my posting about the Canadian courts getting the point about anti-Roma hate crime. That referring site has my favorite Gen X at 40 related comment so far:

Big thank you to Fabrizio for the link!

I’d like to thank all the Fabrizios. Except those in the referral spam industry. It is an industry, right?

Not much later: back on at 7:19 pm. Dernnnnit.

Five Things

I usually do not like “memes” or viral bloggy games and tests that never cumulate or provide us with sound statistical charts but I am too lazy to stick by my usual paper standards this morning. Why? Nils has a good post following on one of these themey-thingies called 5 Things I’ve Done That You Probably Haven’t. Nils are pretty good – except that he is in the entertainment industry and a former radiohead so all his access to celebrities are cheat-a-ramas of the umpteenth degree. And frankly, Nils, anyone who has tried and failed to waterski has waterskied upside-down if only for a moment.

So what have I done? My mind is drawn to celebrity and thinks I ought to go without reference to current work related things:

  • I spoke with Tony Randall in passing (who hasn’t);
  • I taught Billy Bragg to play bar room shuffleboard (rehash, yawn);
  • I invented the term “vitamin K” for Keiths ale (and I am sticking by that one);
  • and…and…good lord…I really am dull…

See, this is why I am no good at these things. I think of things like “I didn’t really like the pie at Helen’s of Michias but really enjoyed the view and the staff’s pleasant attitude” or “I was very happy when me and my grannie-in-law did shooters the night the Jays won the World Series”. So, if you know me, please tell me what I did that makes me as cool as Nils. Hmmm. I did participate in the invention of the one-afternoon game called “bumball” where five-a-side boot a soccer ball high in the air towards the other team and one of them has to trap the ball only with their arse without falling at which time the entire group shouts “BUMBAAAALLLL” as loudly as they can. It was undergrad and it was just before, during or after happy hour…I think.

The Blue Tusk, Syracuse, New York

The last of what Lew Bryson has called “the triumvirate” of Syracuse’s temples to ale, the Blue Tusk, was my favorite for the mood of the day. Much Middle Ages on tap as well as Stone and Victory and even Blue Lite for who knows why. Loud and chatty, we walked in and immediately got into a two and a half hour conversation about Canadian and American differences with a couple of chemical engineers who were regulars. SU had just won a basketball game at the Dome and the place and the streets were loaded with fully grown men dressed in orange. The staff were happy to please and, though busy, a pleasure. One thing I liked is that the place smelled like beer. Not fried food and not smoke.

 

 

 

 

The real surprise of the night was the Syracuse Pale Ale on tap, a revelation of simplicity and quality over complexity and gimmick. If I had one beef it was the understocking of lower alcohol styles. There are some great milds and ordinary bitters out there and, unless you are aiming at getting plastered, a session of 8% to 10% beers is a bit much. Even with that being said, as with Clark’s, the Blue Tusk is all about the quality and handling of real ale but with the hubbub that you sometimes want with your brew.

Free

It’s freedom night on my TV apparently. CBC plays A Bug’s Life – yea, kill the grasshoppers – and then the less happily ended Braveheart – yea, kill the English…oops – and flip to PBS’s Austin City Limits and it is the Polyphonic Spree (warning – the best and most appropriate use of introductory flash pages ever), a seduction of 1968 Jesus freaking Godspellishness meeting an echo of Supertramp, followed by the band Ozomatli which “meshes traditional Latin rhythms with modern hip hop blending in Middle Eastern and African beat.”

I think I need a cup of joe before bed just to straighten my head out. Whew!

Bloggy Triumphalism

I would have posted this Christian Science Monitor article if only because it is by fellow Haligonian and Kings College alumnist and my brother’s fellow Halifax Daily News guy, Tom Regan. Apart from my obvious suckiness and cronyistic motivations, it is an excellent observation of the bloggy triumph of the gut over the brain and pajamastan’s current toying with the dark void:

I’m a big fan of blogs and I truly believe they have the potential to reenergize and redefine journalism. But the reality is, despite what their more ardents boosters say, most blogs are driven by opinion. Occasionally they will uncover a news nugget, but bloggers will then wrap that nugget in so much personal opinion that in the end it bears almost no resemblance to actual events.

Read the whole piece.

More Blogs For Hire

Here is the real story in blogs for 2005 – not their importance but their sale to interests or operation for particular agenda. Consider this post today by Darren Broadfoot:

One of the companies I’m involved with is looking for a particular kind of blogger for a new contract. Jeremy puts it better than I can:

Okay, we’re in need of a new blogger for a confidential client project. It requires a very specific type of person. For lack of a better word, we need someone who’s able to post 3-4 posts a day of the wacky variety. I don’t mean daffy duck kind of wacky, but more like Fark or CollegeHumour kind of wacky.

It’s a 3-month gig to start with. If you’re responsible, familiar with the blogosphere and passionate about blogging.

Consider too that tourist industry of PEI has hired an internet consultant. 2005 will be the year, all under the guise of “the passion for blogging”, that we learn more and more that political blogs are paid for by political parties, that product friendly posts and comments are made by producers and their staff, that gurus are merrily making a good buck at “future forecasting” exactly in the direction of the thing they have already figured out, that pyjamastan is riper for corruption than other media due to its trendiness and de-centralization.

Upon review, I am sure that Darren’s client’s gig is a good one as long as you can be “wacky”, Bittmanesque. It just now needs another name…like “$logging”…perhaps “flogging”¹.

¹[Ed.: Please everyone note that I coined “flogging” because I know someone in France or California posted it last week and is starting to get famous for it.]

Sick With Constitution

Home sick for another day, I am reading a book called On Reading the Constitution by Lawrence Tribe, an author recommended to me by a NYC lawyer recommended to me by a now blogging former-classmate of his as well as a collection of essays on the founding of the USA called To Begin The World Anew by Bernard Bailyn. With the concurrent debate on same-sex marriage as well as my recent spate of trips south, I thought it was time to get some sense of the difference between the US and Canadian constitution and I already am very surprised by a few:

  • The inordinate respect given to the USA’s Founding Fathers and what they must have meant when they penning this or that clause in this or that sentence. In Canada, it is sometimes said that the 1981 patriation of the constitution and the Charter moved us to an American style “written constitution” but this is incorrect as we have a constitution of hundreds of documents from 1700s governor’s letters of instruction to recent agreements on off-shore oil revenue. What we do not have is an uber-text and any care for those who wrote it. The words have to live and die on their own.
  • The misrepresentation of the original intention for separation of church and state seems to contradict the interest in understanding the Founding Fathers. From the outset, ministers of the faith were barred from sitting in a legislature as the rules of the faith had no place in the civic law. Nowadays, there is this idea that the morality and perception of Christianity in the late-eighteenth century was exactly as red staters would wish were the case today. Nothing could be further from the truth and is factually demonstrable. If such an analysis were imported in the Canadian discourse, we would think Sir John A. was a T-totaller.
  • There are no constitutional lawyers in the USA in the same sense as in Canada as the Constitution down south serves as almost an everyday interpretive tool for all law. In Canada, you default to constitutional interpretation when other analyses fail to provide an answer and when applied it is a special case often handled by specializing counsel.
  • That the phenomena of the USA was as much or more in its recreation of the state as it is in its identification of the rights of humans. It was envisaged by fairly ordinary folk like Roger Sherman as much as Thomas Jeffersons and George Washingtons. The concurrent divided jurisdiction of federal and state government being one example of this rethinking of government. The idealism is almost embarassing if it were not actually effective. It makes me wonder that if Napoleon had not emerged in France at the same time as the early USA was trying to get a start whether the War of 1812 may have had a different outcome and we would now, throughout the greater British North America, all have thought what a nutty idea those fellers had way back then.

In Canada our law and history is not a morality play, a battle of good over the void. It is a bargain, an agreement to get along peacefully. The USA is a very different place.