Month: December 2005

Lockerball

I have this memory of being in the car really early on a Summer morning when I was five or so. We are driving around Montreal, there for Expo 67 or Man and His World, and it is the day a Bealtes album was released and the car radio is just playing the lp straight though. I also remember the day that the Bealtes broke up a few years later in 1970, Mom remarking that it made the TV news. But 25 years ago this morning when I heard that Lennon was shot it was the morning of my Grade 12 English exam and we were playing lockerball waiting to be let in the room to write. Lockerball was just volleyball with a scrunched up ball of paper hit back and forth over the rock of lockers, one on one. You couldn’t see where the other guy was going to hit it. Like a good game of hack or bumball, it was one of those games that was only played in one place for a few weeks by a few people and then it passed.

Lennon was in a revival. We had copies of Double Fantasy and picture sleeve 45s of “Starting Over” and all had braced ourselves a few times on false alarms that the Beatles were going to play Saturday Night Live even though we also listened to the Talking Heads and the other new music. We grinded away at their songs on guitar in friends basements and argued by the resevior on Friday night who was more the most useless Beatle over whatever bad red Hungarian wine someone had been able to get. I had sold all my X-men comics one day on a trip to Halifax to buy German pressings of Beatles releases. I still have them. Lennon dying seemed to start a spate of shootings or maybe was the height of them. I heard Reagan was shot when I jumped in the car after soccer practice and the Pope was shot around then, too. But Lennon died and when I was 17 it was really bad, cursing by the lockers before the exam began.

Canadian Satellite Radio

As you all know all too well, I am a radio nerd. I was a member of the Radio Prague Listeners Club, have received reception report confirmation cards from many nations, held a trans-Atlantic reception record for a while when I heard local East German radio in my old Nova Scotian home, listen through buzzing and clicking interference on poor reception nights to catch a moment of Steve Somers of WFAN and shared with you my joy at hearing California from eastern Lake Ontario a year and a half ago.

I have radio nerd cred and, though I am not hardcore, I would think that I would be the guy that satellite radio is aimed at. But when I have a look at what Sirius Canada is offering – now that the CRTC mandated puritanical technology delay is almost ready to be lifted – I just don’t know. I have a computer at home and one at work. Both play a bazillion stations and even some amateur nutcases making really bad radio to bring down the man, being in this case the corporate structure of global media, with their iPod (charmingly unaware of the irony all others see given that iPod is todays jewel in the crown of a corporate communication empire.) And yes, I have a bitchin’ Sony 2010 which has healed itself nicely which is my real window on the world. Plus I have a car with that wonder of wonders an AM/FM radio with which I can enjoy the exciting exploration of the unknown as I travel.

So what does paying $14.95 plus tax to get a subscription to Sirius Canada get me? Is it just that it will be the same wherever you are? How dull and dulling. More stardardized delocalized Omnitopian fare. Are you planning to sign on? Is anyone?

Cricketing Powerhouse

Odd that the Pakistani bowler Shoaib Akhtar should celebrate victory over England by running through a crowd of his teammates, flinging them into the air. But it is a different game and, as the BBC reports:

Inspired by Kaneria’s exploits, Shoaib then summoned up all his energy to deliver a destructive spell of his own.

No wonder I don’t really get this sport.

Holy Moley!

I have not yet gotten into the NHL again but I still know enough to know this is a massive trade:

The San Jose Sharks swung a shocking, blockbuster trade on Wednesday, acquiring Joe Thornton for a trio of former first-round draft picks. San Jose swapped Wayne Primeau, Marco Sturm and Brad Stuart for the talented Boston Bruins captain. “To get a player of this calibre, you have to give up something to get something,” Sharks general manager Doug Wilson stated. “You would make this trade last month, this month or next year.”

First thing I thought of was Esposito going to New York.

Day Three: What Phoney Campaign?

You didn’t think I was going to do this every day, did you? I couldn’t imagine pretending there was something of interest in every day of the campaign. But yesterday there was.

The Conservative’s call for a public prosecutor is very interesting. It places the accountability argument into the procedural realm which ought to be a yawner but it makes the issue of scandal not about what occurred but how it was treated. Nova Scotia has had a public prosecutor since the need to keep the Progressive Conservative Buchanan government in line became so obvious after so many of them were charged for this crime or that while in office. One wonders if the Saskatchwan Tories of Grant Devine might have better kept their hands out of the cookie jar had a public prosecutor been in place.

The idea also need not be limited to alleged crimes by those in office. In Scotland an office exists called the Procurator Fiscal which I understand is independent of both the police and the prosecutors and which determines if a criminal charge is warranted or not. They also handle complaints against the police. Similarly in the US there are grand juries, consisting of members of the public, who have to be told by the prosecutors of the charges and convinced that a proceeding should go on.

So Harper’s idea of an intermediary between the police investigation and a bringing of an accused to trial is both useful, tried and true and essentially neutral. Politically it is inordinately astute. How can you argue against it?