Month: September 2006

Mets Clinch

Good to see the Mets win their division. If we are not going to see a repeat of the evisceration of the Yankees that was the Sox comeback of 2004 (not quite on point but satisfying photo here), seeing them lose in a subway series to the Mets is the next best thing. Delgado made an amazing first-to-second-to-first double play later in the game. Best news is that Pedro will be back for the division series. And why rush him?

YouTubian Reality

Even though YouTube is drawing all the kids away from bloggging and into gawking, I like it. It is simple to use, provides me with access to most every video I can think of from my university days and even some sports events that I enjoy remembering. Its days, however, may be numbered:

Universal Music Group, the world’s largest record company, contends the wildly popular Web sites YouTube and MySpace are violating copyright laws by allowing users to post music videos and other content involving Universal artists. “We believe these new businesses are copyright infringers and owe us tens of millions of dollars,” Universal Music CEO Doug Morris told investors Wednesday at a conference in Pasadena. “How we deal with these companies will be revealed shortly…bwa-haha” [Ed.: ok. I added the “…bwa-haha”.] Universal’s talks with YouTube Inc. have deteriorated and the recording giant is set to file a copyright infringement lawsuit against the video-sharing company if no agreement is reached by the end of the month, according to a person familiar with the talks who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the confidential nature of the negotiations.

Is anyone surprised? If I owned video that I received revenue from and found it was avaliable for free on the next website, I would be gutted as well. And while Napster was all about peer to peer sharing care of a bit of software, YouTube is centralized and therefore far more prone as a concept to being shut down. That is in addition to the question of its unclear business model and how the YouTubians make a buck.

Yet in celebration of what it is and what it soon will be was, I give you the Pretenders playing “Middle of the Road” live (song circa 1983/84, concert much later):

The Day of Fri Is When There Is Chat

What a week – a blur. I swear I was 27 when it started and now I have kids
and a mortgage. Thing I learned? Buying gifts for a kids party was easier when
they were two. You can buy an old shoe and stick some red masking tape on it and
a two-year old would be happy. Now they have taste and ideas. I am doomed.

  • Rummy Update: You know I am a Powellista so find these things Rummy says funny in a really sad and depressing funny kinda way:

    “Many of the terrorists who have not been killed or captured are on the run. They have lost their sanctuary in Afghanistan. And they have lost a supporter in Iraq, which paid $25,000 to the families of suicide bombers…”

    The observation I would make is that the actions the Canadian Forces have made in Afghanistan in the last few weeks to clear an area of the Taliban happened “about 15 kilometres southwest of Kandahar city” and so far “about 65 per cent of the contested area, measuring perhaps four kilometres by five kilometres, has been formally cleared of insurgents.” I am a big booster of what our Canadian Forces are doing there but characterizing what has happening so far after almost five years of continuing warfare as a “loss of sanctuary” in a country of 652,225 square kilometres is not quite an accurate statement.

  • I came across a blog by an English Magistrate, including this
    post     complaining that not enough prosecutions are being brought before
    her/him for short-pouring beer. That is my kinda judge.

  • Everytime I read articles like this about Alberta’s
    oil windfall     I get the giggles over the twit that argued the difference
    between Alberta and the rest of Canada was not the largest oil deposit in the
    universe but the prevalence of socialism elsewhere.

  • I just finished Pete Brown’s book Three Sheets to the Wind. I have to
    do a proper review over at A Good Beer Blog after fellow beer blogger Knut of Norway and I pose the author some
    questions. I reviewed his last book here. This one
    is even better – a romp around the world to figure out how each culture includes
    beer.

  • Was yesterday the day that lame duck
    began in the US presidency?

    Democrats are rapt spectators, however, shielded by
    the stern opposition to the president being expressed by three Republicans with
    impeccable credentials on military matters: Senators John McCain of Arizona,
    John W. Warner of Virginia and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. The three were
    joined on Thursday by Colin L. Powell, formerly the secretary of state and the
    chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in challenging the administration’s
    approach.

    It is one of those rare Congressional moments when the policy is as
    monumental as the politics.

    When you look ahead, the road to
    January 2009 could be a very long and weird path. That being said, Democrat Eliot Spitzer, the next Governor of
    NY, has really good TV ads. The public good as a matter of responsibility – who
    knew? If I were in the southern sector of Easlakia, I could see myself getting
    involved.

  • Say
    it ain’t so, Dog    .

  • How to identify when you have a Jr. B pope on your
    hands. And get in line, Islamic world. He was giving
    us the gears     last week. Time again for the Avenging Lumberjacks of the
    Reformation, Canada’s moderate protestant underground based in the Yukon, to
    come out of the shadows of the forest to take a stand.

Well, that is
enough for now. What to look forward to this weekend? Syracuse at Illinois
Saturday at noon if you have the 37 billion channel universe. Sox and Yankees if
you like human sacrifice.

Help A Blogger Out

Ian asks an interesting question:

I am not out to solicit praise. Someone please tell me how I can do this blog differently, or what they would do with this space. Dialogue is all but dead, and the rest is gossip. If this is merely a place to put photos, I could do it on Flickr. Are blogs really just the domain of knitters and people who are still dating? If we’ve all made up our minds, why are any of us still talking?

Even as stats crash and the false promise of blogging pans out fully, I often think that this blog and others are geared primarily to trigger response. Seeing as that is part of our CIA funding agreement, it makes sense. So respond – if you have any requests for topics and themes, let me know. Should there be a Tantrama City reunion mini-series? Should I finally make up my mind and join a political party? Should I just stay home and cut out all this travelling?

At least go tell Ian what to do.

I Never Liked Starbucks

I went once in Vancouver, paid waaaaay too much for essentially a 25 cent product and never went back. But apparently some people want their Starbucks coffee quite badly:

A Starbucks customer in the US who was told her free drink voucher was worthless is launching a $114m (£60m) lawsuit against the coffee colossus. Starbucks pulled the free drink offer, saying it had been redistributed beyond its original intent.

There is this thing in law called de minimus, things so tiny that the law can’t see them so it doesn’t bother with them. A free coupon for a coffee is about as de minimus as I can imagine.

There Is A Club For Everything

Some days you just don’t know what to write. There is nothing decent to steal off of other bloggers, the news is the same or worse and its a rainy cold evening that feels so much like the fall that it could be Newfoundland in July. Then think of the seach you have never searched before in 15 years of surfing and there it is – you’ve come across the Vintage Snowmobile Club of America and your faith in mankind is restored.

I don’t know why I think this is neato…

1974 Mercury Sno Twister for sale (Serial Number 16 of 1000). It is in pieces, but I can assure you everything is there. I recently bought a NOS track, MANY NOS engine parts (Gaskets, seals, rings, a jug, and good condition used heads for it). The seat, hood, and bellypan are there, and in ok shape. There is much more so ask questions if you would like. Make Offer

…but I think it speaks to the same need to determine what Shakespeare looked like or what the big bang was really like. These are variations on a theme and the theme is developing idle pointless skills and knowledge. I’m not even handy at all and have no shed but the idea of buying something on the basis of “I can assure you everything is there” is intriguing to me.

I have a pal who has said that if I see a boat for a hundred dollars I am to buy it. I think he has about seven now. Because he has told everyone that. We all have it. We all want to sit in a shed in a slightly smelly old armchair that is actually quite comfortable if you know just where to park yourself as the sun comes through the door nicely and, besides, you know where the rum is. Its called young old crazy guy syndrome. We all have it but these guys really have it – the Old Lawnmower Club on England. Look upon their knowledge and gaze in wonder. I even caught myself thinking that lawn mowing history is actually a little interesting – and wondering who would want a nine-inch wide mower? – but now knowing that “Shanks Britisher” is not only the last words of gratitude a Nazi escapee would have uttered to his collaborator pal as he rowed out to the U-boat on that moonless night.

Five Years On

I suppose many of us thought at the time that we would not get to this point in the way that we have. We thought the world had changed and that things like irony and division were finished. When I go in to the archives of this blog and search for “9/11”, I find a lot I have written and you have writing about the day, the attacks and the implications. I wrote this in 2003, wrote this in 2004 – which includes my first post 9/11 comment on Steve’s blog – and here is what I wrote last year.

I still compare events now to the events of my younger years and the nuclear fear that gripped and consider the fall of the Berlin Wall the critical turning event I have witnessed. This would not be the same for those who, like Ian, were much much closer. But if I think of concepts like fear, solidarity, security, hope, peace, resolution, terror I do not think we have entered a new era unless that new area is one of stalemate. The stalemate includes that of the mind, of policy but also in each of our emotional relation to the event. Even with events like the bombing in London last summer, so many more people have died since in waves of response to 9/11 and in other places like Darfur; so many terrorist attacks have not occured since through both the success of security as well as the fact that there are not thousands in Al Queda waiting to shoe bomb or poison water supplies or set of a dirty bomb but far fewer with far fewer resources than we could have thought watching the towers fall; so many other events have happened since which have killed so many – especially the tsunami and New Orleans – that it may be time to think beyond the stalemate. I think that includes Canada’s fight in Afghanistan, the actual war on terror which should always have been the focus and not elsewhere. Undoing the places and the political cultures where killing and dehumanizing are taught must be done – and where they really are may have to be admitted.

More than anything, however, today my thoughts are with Trevor Greene and his family. We talk of what has changed since 9/11 and what we have given up and frankly I have given up nothing. We have not taken on a total war against terror, though we have taken on a professional one. And Trevor heard the call to join that fight to reconstruct and remake the societies in the valleys along the Afghan-Pakistan border where schools became suicide fighter training grounds, where sports stadiums became slaughter houses for militant puritan idealists, where reason was driven out – and he did so for me and us. And as the newspaper article an old friend of his and mine has linked to this morning explains, Trevor has given up much and now fights another fight I will not have to.