Month: April 2007

A Canard, I Say!!!

While the story is interesting in its own right, the summation is the business:

The objection that reform would mean that rural interests would be ignored is a canard. The change would require candidates to present positions that galvanized all Americans. This is the truer and more certain path of democracy.

A canard! The claim to evoke rural interests is often a canard. A specious one, at that. I, in fact, am going to take up that accusation as a day to day sort of turn of phrase: “That, sir, is a most specious canard.” Like the continuing existence of the Electoral College itself. A specious canard and perhaps even a trumped-up one.

April Showers Bring Friday Bullet-pointy Chatt-a-ramas

This week. This was a short week. Short weeks are good in that Friday comes faster but it also has the air of less than a full week off as much as less than a full week of work. But was another week in your life. And it has passed.

  • Later Update: man’s only trump card soon to be lost thanks to science.
  • Lunchtime Update: NYCO knows where the bees are.
  • Update: please consider and vote for the best of beer poetry. The prize is a weekend of free beer so make your decisions carefully.
  • Speaking of passing, this was the week that Kurt Vonnegut died. I first read his books when one should – in my late teens. In my mind, I vaguely lump him with the also late Peter Sellers but he is almost the opposite. Sellers was a big jerk personally and only celebrated the absurdities of life as an angst-ridden professional. Vonnegut advocated contentment, humour and compassion for this life in all he did, even as he suffered from personal depression.
  • One of my constant bloggy reads throughout the years has been Ian at xtcian.com and he is celebrating his fifth bloggiversary today with a retrospective. I’ve followed him through his medicated post-9/11 volunteering singlehood to his medicated becoming a husband through his medicated struggles as a movie maker through his medicated struggles as a TV writer through now his days as Daddy. Because he comes to the game as a good writer he is, in my opinion, the best personal blogger on the net. And I say that even though his regular updates with pictures of his kids are the second nicest photos of family – after mine…which, of course, I never post because I have a clue about data mining and biometrics.
  • I have been trying to think of analogies in Canadian culture on the Don Imus now-firing. I think that it is a good thing that this pervasive voice was fired for saying such a foul thing – and saying it in such an offhand…even, dare I say, entitled manner – that was focused on a specific and small group of young people who achieved only excellence. The closest I can think of as an equivalent would be Don Cherry calling our national women’s hockey team Pepsis and sluts. But he never would. He may be a dope but he is not cruel. I think that is the thing and maybe it is the thing that broke the back of the shock-jock’s status even with all his good work for charity.
  • The Tiger points us to the photo of the week. I miss Jean like I miss Ed Broadbent.
  • The BBC is running an interesting series examining anti-Americanism. Being at a peak of pro-Americanism in my personal life these days (what with baseball being my main sport of obsession now, what with my upstate day-tripping, what with listening largely to NCPR and WFAN for my radio diet, what with my exploration of BBQ and what with the dreary nature of Canadian politics compared to the gold mine that is local New York state politics) I find anti-Americanism beyond my understanding. I am fortunate in what I am able to do and have a more than a couple of projects on the go that get me involved in cross-border discussions. But was not always the case – I suppose, like me, many more Canadians can say that compared to say in the 80’s. Is this, too, due to free trade?

What a load of bullets. Usually I struggle with these but those whipped right out. Now for coffee to be followed by spelling mistake correction.

One Hitter

It was a pitchers’ duel last night between the Sox and the Mariners. Dice K was really good but Seattle’s Felix Hernandez was an entire class better. It was quite the thing to see screw ball action pitches in the top of an inning being followed by 99 mile an hour fastballs in the bottom. Hernandez’s calm no-hitter was broken in the eighth. He’s had only four hits against him this year and at 21 may be the real phenomenon of the next couple of decades.

Matt Campbell’s photo above (European Pressphoto Agency) was in The New York Times this morning and continues the paper’s dedication to great baseball photography. The interesting thing for me is how it captures how the green of Fenway acts as sympathetically to highlight the colour of the grass and the red dirt. A classic shot, given the location of the ball and Ichiro’s foot.

Camera Bombs

This story reminded me of an idea I had years ago:

Google is using its popular online mapping service to call attention to atrocities in the Darfur region of Sudan. In a project with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, inaugurated Tuesday, the Internet search company has updated its Google Earth service with high resolution satellite images of the region to document destroyed villages, displaced people and refugee camps.

My idea? After Rwanda and the Bosnian war and news of slaughter and the concentration camps, I wondered why it was that there were no camera bombs out of which hundreds of little C-U-See-Me style cameras on parachutes are deployed over sites of atrocities broadcasting direct to satellites, landing unseen or picked up by those on the ground to record what was happening to them. The lack of video for CNN to show over and over has been as much the difference between the war on terror and larger human rights disasters like Darfur.

Group Project: What If Kaiser Meant More Than A Pickle’s Neighbour?

Marvel Comics had a comic series in the 1970’s called “What If…” or maybe it was “What If???” I actually have a box of comics within reach that likely has a copy but I am too lazy to reach out my arm to answer the punctuation question. Which goes to show I have my priorities and values right on track.

But all the ceremonies and discussion about Vimy Ridge got me thinking. And not thinking about what if the radioactive spider bit Aunt May instead of Peter Parker. People sometimes wonder what would have happened if the Soviets had, say, taken West Germany or if the Nazis had beaten back D-Day or even if Napoleon had taken Moscow. But what would have happened if the Germans had won WWI? What if the Americans never entered the war, Mexico aligned with Germany in secret, Belgium disappeared, France lost its top chunk but moved on, Britain kept its navy but never had the General Strikes, maybe the Whites won or never fell in Russia and Nazism never popped up as a reaction to the economic ruin that was imposed on Germany.

What kind of world would we have today? Would it be in any way recognizable? Is it the part of recent history that most changed the world?

Sports Pool 2007: Morton And NHL Playoffs

I woke up this morning too early. I was thinking, as The Smiths played in my mind, “why am I running a sports pool that there is a 50-50 chance I won’t see out, won’t tally up the points, have lost interest in?” Is it because I have not watched one NHL game this whole season? Maybe it’s because it is so virtually assured that the Morton will be promoted that I can’t use that as a question…unless:

6. Morton needs just one win to automatically move up next season to the SFA First Division. When will Morton secure promotion?

  • a. 14 April against Raith?
  • b. 21 April against Stranraer?
  • c. 28 April against Ayr?
  • d. Morton will choke but be promoted through the playoff.
  • e. Morton will not be promoted.

Twenty five points for the right answer.

7. NHL playoffs:

  • a. Which eight teams advance to the second round? Five points each correct.
  • b. Which four teams advance to the semi-finals? Ten points each correct.
  • c. Which two teams are in the finals? Fifteen points each correct.
  • d. Which team wins the Stanley Cup? Twenty-five points each correct.
  • e. Pick a goon. Two points for every penalty minute.
  • f. Pick a goalie. One point for every thousandth their save average is above .850. Goalie must play three complete games.
  • g. Pick five scorers. One point for every goal and one for every assist.

Like when the heck am I ever going to have the time to ever figure out all the scores for that many questions? Sure I can post all these questions but it is actually tallying up that takes the time. And it will be spring. And warm. And there will be gardening to do and stuff. Good luck to you.

Answers in by 7 pm tonight. Catch up with the sports pool with all the questions to date here

Saying Rude Words On The Radio

The only time I have ever had the Don Imus show on was when I left the radio WFAN on all night. It is a weird show and that essentially because it is unfunny. And not just in its current embarrassment for using a racial slur so much as the second year undergrad quality of the slur and all the other largely insult-based humour that goes on the show day after day. I don’t know who needs to hear that in the morning, just as I don’t know who needs to hear Rush Limbaugh and his apologism for anything that can hover before the addled mind behind that microphone. Is it that people in cars and with insufficient caffeine need to wake up to thoughts of superiority over over-paid idiots…or do people actually associate themselves with dolts like these and their mental wrongness?

I watched that new TV improv comedy show on NBC last night, Thank God You’re Here. Dave Foley of Kids in the Hall hosted. It was actually funny and funny in a way that was even more genial that Whose Line Is It Anyway, the last great stab at improv – especially the US version hosted by Drew Carey. Imus is essentially improv of a sort. Political audio improv. So is Limbaugh. Like the Second City sort of comedians, they really come armed with no clue as to what politics will thrust upon them on any given day (or apparently much background on the reasons behind what happens) and they have a regularly recycled set of knee-jerk reactions. Yet unlike Foley and Limbaugh, they are not witty – there is no gleam of a telling truth. Why? The inherent rut and dolt as much as anything. Can the two converge? Could John Stewart do unscripted political radio on a daily basis? Is it inevitable that there would be a wallowing in “guy laugh” – the sound unassociated with a joke – and simple vacuous nastiness? Hard to say as it as never existed otherwise.

Thank God for sports talk radio.

Another Day, Another Opportunity To Write A Beer Poem

Yes, I do go on…poems, poems, poems. But I really need to have these tickets for free beer at TAP NY 2007 in the hands of those who will use them to drink free beer. Is that so wrong? Listen. I am the one around here who put in four good years of my life to get a BA in English Literature and I better get some action on this contest or I will think of them as lost years. Lost. Which is kind of appropriate as my quick survey of some of the better known pub and beer sorts of poems out there is kind of depressing. Let’s review them, shall we? Because that is what four years of B-grades in English Lit got me, the power to review.

The comment by Captain Hops of Beer Haiku Daily is exactly right. “At The Quinte Hotel,” posted yesterday, is a fantastic poem. Likely the best you will ever read or at least the best I have read so far.¹ Yet there is a melancholy about the respective place of beer and poetry that is at the core of the poem.

Back in the Enlightenment, things were not so cheery as that. In April 1737, Aaron Hill penned “Alone, in an Inn, at Southhampton” which is about as dreary a sentiment as any I have come across. Mind you, 1737 wasn’t any sort of non-stop party generally but really:

Scarce can a passion start, (we change so fast)
E’re new lights strike us, and the old are past.
Schemes following schemes, so long life’s taste explore,
That, e’er we learn to live, we live no more.

Perhaps one less drink for Aaron next time, bartender. A generation later, Thomas Warton wrote “Solitude at an Inn” and at least recognized the opportunity to stay away from the outside world and even the others at the inn as something of a positive:

No poetic being here
Strikes with airy sounds mine ear;
No converse here to fancy cold
With many a fleeting form I hold,
Here all inelegant and rude
Thy presence is, sweet Solitude.

Inelegant and rude! Sounds like a snob out for some slumming to me. Warton’s contemporary, William Shenstone, on the other hand gets his values right in his poem “Written At An Inn“:

Here, waiter! take my sordid ore,
Which lackeys else might hope to win;
It buys what courts have not in store,
It buys me Freedom, at an inn.

Fabulous. While Hill, Warton and Shenstone all provide that personal reflection that foreshadowed romanticism, only the latter was not a total drip and might have actually been someone you might have enjoyed meeting at the pub.

Another generation on and we have “Original Elegy on a Country Alehouse” by Thomas Dermody which loses me somewhat as to who is the subject of any given line, leading me to think I am suppose to mourn the passing of a poetic ale-swigging cat. Flash forward to the late Victorian era and consider he-of-the-ale Thomas Hardy‘s 1898 poem “At an Inn” from Wessex Poems and Other Verses. Please consider it yourself as I have really no idea what is going on except perhaps a Victorian version of “Day Time Friends, Night time Lovers” or some other 1970s new country crap.

Finally – for now – we see that contemporary tavern poetry is well exemplified by “In The Black Rock Tavern” by Judith Slater, published in 2004. Like Purdy’s work, it wells you why the comfort of the pub is important without discussing the point. No tryst gone wrong, no nose turned up at the company. Just a place and a moment where you are taken for you are.

So enter now and enter often. I set the limit at 50 words minimum or three stanzas of thematically connected haiku. More about the contest here. I had said that you should post your poem in the comments before the deadline of 4 pm EDT, Tuesday 10 April 2007 but lets extend that to the 12th. I need time to make sure the prizes are in hand but want as many entries as possible. After all – free craft beer. Not bad.

¹For someone with a B-grade in English Lit from over 20 years ago these two concepts merge.

Easter Monday Plans

Easter Monday is the weirdest of holidays. A civic holiday in lieu of a religious holiday. No other religious holiday recognized in law is fixed to a day of the week so, appropriately for my present purposes, we still get the Monday off.

I have failed in my past Easter Monday plans. Since 2005, I have failed to learn more about Boogaloo music. Given two years since that thought, I could have become something of an amateur expert. So too, however, went my adult novice homeschooling in Arabic and Dutch years earlier and I have come to expect these short comings of mine. But I have also been a man of action. In 2004, I was on the Wolfe Island Ferry on Easter Monday. In 2006, I bought a banjo as it was the day before Happy Me Day! Because I needed a banjo. What are the things I need ten days before the 2007 version of HMD?

1. A trombone mouthpiece
2. a newly shingled roof by the end of the summer
3. a garden shovel
4. passports by the end of the year
5. shotputs

That is not too bad. And just to fill out the calendar, this blog started almost four years ago, on a day which was four days after Easter Monday 2003.

Today I will brew. I will do laundry and dishes and scrub here and there first but in the afternoon I shall brew…unless I nap.

Iranian Suit Breakthrough

Styling. That is what it was all about. Not the need to protect Iranian waters. Not the pressure coming from the UN. It was the need to get a higher profile for the Iranian men’s suit industry and I have to say Mr. Ahmadinejad has a point. Those are some manly shades of grey and choosing the uniformity in the shirt rather than the suit itself was something of a master stroke.

Tough work being a prospective dictator given the neighbourhood.