Month: March 2006

Japan Freaks Out

I couldn’t think of anything else to say about this news from that bastion of democracy somewhere below your toes:

Most foreigners visiting Japan would be photographed and fingerprinted under controversial legislation approved Tuesday by the country’s cabinet. Children under 16, diplomats and permanent residents — such as ethnic Koreans born in Japan — would be exempt from the requirements. The government wants the bill voted into law during the current session of parliament, which ends on June 18. If the law is adopted, advance lists of passengers and crew members would also be required for all airplanes and ships arriving in Japan.

Yumpin’ Yimminy! Strike another country off my list of places to visit. I say we make each Japanese traveller do tongue twisters upon landing in Canada. Or jumping jacks. It will be of about as much use and will be more entertaining.

Google To Control Everything

When does this stuff get to be a concern?

Web giant Google is planning a massive online storage facility to encompass all users’ files, it is reported. The plans were allegedly revealed accidentally after a blogger spotted notes in a slideshow presentation wrongly published on Google’s site…

“We deleted the slide notes because they were not intended for publication,” Google spokeswoman Lynn Fox said. “We are constantly working on new ways to enhance our products and services for users, but have nothing to announce at this time.”

Would we not be concerned if it was China or the CIA or General Motors or even Coors Beer? Why is Google less a threat? It’s the funny name in the friendly primary colours, isn’t it.

#20 – Is He Or Isn’t He?

[ toast crunch.]

Him: [mumbles as paper snaps]…who the hell is this guy?…

Her: [from next room] Whaaat?

Him: NOTHING! [mumbles again] Hamas now sorta ok, he meets with Clinton, he turns on the Ethics Commissioner…even if the guy is a hack, why bother rising to the bait?

Oh, my God. Look at this in MacLeans. Look who wrote it!

Because surely what people have discovered about me by now is that I think a few steps ahead. Not to say that I made the decisions before I got here. But I certainly knew what the parameter of the options were… It doesn’t mean that everything you do has to be popular. But everything you are doing has to be serving the public interest. And you’ll have to, in due course, justify it to the population. I’ve been attacked so much in the past few years it doesn’t really matter to me. I always ask myself what will the public’s reaction be to such-and-such a decision or such-and-such a move by the time we get to the next election, when the public actually makes a judgment. So the temporary reaction of a columnist or whatever today doesn’t really mean anything. You have to ask yourself, “How is this going to look to the public in due course?”

“…or whatever”?!?! Like Parliament? I can’t wait to get back into the House and see this guy sweating. Usually it takes two years for an opposition to start tossing around the word arrogant…this guy’s ripe for the tomato toss from day one.

So much like whatshisname…Parizeau…another economist who doesn’t think Canada is a real country…HAH!

Her: [from next room] Whaaat?

Him: NOTHING! [ toast crunch, tea slurp.]

Contemplating A House

With the best of intentions to get fiscally responsible and also become maybe more useful by having sufficient space for projects, we are thinking of a house. A house means, of course, paying mortgage interest, maintenance costs, mowing, shovelling, maybe a second car again and not being in a tax locked rental so even thinking about it give my brain an ache and my knees a wobble. All fun money gone. Spent on the septic system – truly #1 on the best feelings you can have writing a cheque unexpectly. Trips to Canadian Tire to buy tools I do not really understand to try fixing it (whatever it is) myself again badly. Yes, I have owned a house and known the nausea imagining the roof blowing off. Fortunately, I sold it before the eye of Hurricane Juan went by the back door.

But new to this homeownership nausea is the idea of not having broadband. The very idea of going to dial-up makes me feel like a move back to the mid-90s. Using this Bell Sympatico internet coverage widget with the telephone book makes me think that rural life is out of the question. So has that become the canary in a coalmine of my life? Am I such a part of the urban Borg that where formerly I could not live without a rototiller and a post hole digger (my Phd) I now cannot imagine living without the building’s pool, the maintenance guy as well as broadband?

Trevor Greene

I got this sad report through the Kings College grapevine this afternoon:

A Canadian soldier in Afghanistan is in critical but stable condition after being attacked by a man wielding an axe during a meeting with tribal elders today. The reservist soldier, Lieutenant Trevor Greene, of Vancouver was initially taken to the Canadian-led multinational hospital at Kandahar Airfield where he underwent treatment for head wounds. He will now be airlifted to the U.S. medical facility in Landstuhl, Germany, said CTV’s Steve Chao, in Kandahar. Early reports suggested Greene was injured in a firefight with insurgents. It was later learned that he was attacked during a sit-down meeting with tribal elders when a man struck him in the back of the neck with an axe.

Trevor was a couple of years behind me in undergrad but Kings being so small we certainly knew each other, played intramurals, argued over the merits of pre- or post-Wham George Michaels and shared beers. It is quite the thing, 20 odd years after the age folk sign up, that Trevor was still ready and able to volunteer as a reservist. Thoughts today are with him.

In addition to be an officer in the Canadian reserves, Trevor is an author and journalist who wrote on the killings of prostitutes in Vancouver which are now the subject matter of the Pickton trial. More here and here and here and here.

Update, March 8: more stories on Trevor and his condition here, here, here, here and here.

Update, March 9: There is an interview in the Toronto Star with Trevor’s Dad. More here.

Update, March 10: A good story in the Vancouver Sun today about Trevor’s time in the navy.

Update, March 11: here is a CBC radio interview with Trevor’s Dad, Richard Greene. The link should open a real audio player and the interview is about 6 minutes long. [Later] Here is a story from CTV about improvement in Trevor’s health over the last few days.

Update, March 13: Here is a story from the Ottawa Citizen today with updated information on the state of Trevor’s health.

Update, March 15: Trevor’s back in Vancouver.

Update, March 22: Stephen Kimber (who knows Trevor as a Journalism professor at Kings then and now – and who posted in the comments below) wrote this article on the attack on Trevor.

Update, March 29: Barb in Vancouver has posted an update.

Update, April 26: Debbie has posted an update on the great improvements on Trevor over here.

Update, April 27-28: news updates of Debbie’s comment posting here and here and here and here.

Update, 29 April 2006: our pal Stephen Maher has a very good essay in the Chronical Herald today.

Update, 14 September 2006: there was an update on Trevor’s condition in the Vancouver Sun this week.

Update, 21 October 2006: there was an update in the Globe and Mail this morning with lots of quotes from lots of you. Funny – I have never seen the words “Mr.” and “Gibson” placed together in that way. Sounds like Trevor is moving forward.

Update, 16 December 2006: The Toronto Star has an article on Trevor’s recovery in this morning’s paper.

None

Sullying

Graceless politicization appears to be the flavour of the day in the new PMO:

“The Prime Minister is loath to co-operate with an individual whose decision-making ability has been questioned and who has been found in contempt of the House,” said Sandra Buckler, a spokeswoman for Mr. Harper. “All this really is, is a partisan complaint and a political dispute.”

Get ready for it. Any bureaucrat now may be a “liberal” therefore a lesser species in the eyes of the rural overlords. Morality over process. Despite the question of the propriety of offering benefits and plums – plums– like cabinet posts to party defectors undermining the House of Commons, unlike the similar review during the Gruwal matter when the Liberals were the potential bad guys. Sure the new PM intents to line in a different world one day but in the meantime you shouldn’t get to pick your rules. The most charming bit of hair splittery was mentioned on the CBC last night when apparently the PMO suggested that there is no Parliament at the moment so there was not jurisdiction for an ethical inquiry…therefore no ethical standards at all. Sweet.

Book Review: Travels With Barley, Ken Wells

I have not yet gotten on to the great reviewing list out there even if I am on the great beer news PR consultant list. That’s OK as I pretty much like most beer books that are put before me including this one.

Travels With Barley: A Journey Through Beer Culture In America, published in 2004, intregued me as soon as I saw the title. When I created the half-begun and definitely past deadline Journal of Culture and Brewing, ISSN 1715-7811, I had an idea that there was something in and around beer that had not really discussed much, something that I encountered in relation to baseball through the Cooperstown Symposium which looks at baseball as a cultural event and not just a sport. The call for papers for the 2006 Symposium stated:

Proposals for papers are invited from all disciplines and on all topics. For the 2006 symposium, preference will be given to those submissions which focus on the relationship of baseball to the African-American and other minority communities. Papers on baseball as baseball are not encouraged. Submission is by abstract only. Abstracts should be narrative, limited to three type-written pages and a one page vitae…

So what would a study of beer not for beer’s sake look like? For author Ken Wells that means hunting for the best beer joint in America following the track of the Mississippi river from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. Wells is a Wall Street Journal writer and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, according to the dust sleeve, and his writing style shows it. A good read. Light but substantive.

I am only fifty pages in but, hey, I’m the guy who wrote the paper on the six discourses of Descartes after finishing the third one…it was Friday afternoon, what do you expect? So far I am liking this book. I don’t know if it will come to any conclusions about beer and culture on the big river and maybe that is OK. What I like is it is not an atlas, not a history and not a style guide. It is a travel with beer that takes beer serious as a travel mate. I will give more notes as I work through it.