Month: August 2007

Blogging Convention With Low Ambitions

I noticed this brief article at the NYT about a blogging convention and thought that was a little weird. Blogging conventions sorta died in 2004-2005 not long after they started. But at least this one has some admission in its own blog that things are different in a post entitled “Is Blogging Dead?”:

Not according to Hugh MacLeod at Gaping Void. In two recent posts “Why We’re All Blogging Less”, and “Blogging Isn’t Dead It’s Just a Subset of Something Much Larger and More Important.”

More important??? The hobby of the masses is a direct extension of pen-pal-ing that President Eisenhower encouraged the people of the world to take up in his inaugeral speech of 1953. What could be more important.

The funniest thing about that post is the thing that is supposedly “more important” is content-less web stuff like Twitter and Facebook. Apparently the revolution is truly here and all the pages are blank after all. Ever get the feeling that Web 3.0 will all be about masking household odors?

Power Turns On The Ferry

pictferry1

Yesterday, we took the Glenora ferry over to Prince Edward County. Easlakia is a ferry fan’s dream with five within an hour of HQ and more in the hinterland like those on the Ottawa river and Lake Champlain. Yet, I have never had the ferry captain put on a show like yesterday when, apparently as a surprise for one young passenger brought up to the wheelhouse, he did a couple of power turns. I got a bit of a movie of it: [Ed.: remember we use super slow technology for these short short films – in this case a 7.5 MB .avi file]. As you see the landscape zip by, appreciate that the camera is facing the bow and not one of the sides of the ship.

The NuGovernment Loves Wikiality

You know, it is a great idea to set up something that sounds like an encyclopedia that anyone can edit. It just has to turn out to be the best source of truth going. And Canadians are sooooo trustworthy. Dudly Do-right picked up a Canadian Federal government wage, right? Just like the people doing this:

A website that tracks the origins of millions of edits to Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, shows that computers inside federal government offices are responsible for more than 11,000 changes to articles, including some significant edits of entries about parliamentarians. WikiScanner, a website launched on Monday by a U.S. graduate student, shows that changes to articles originated from computers inside a variety of government offices, such as the House of Commons, Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Environment Canada and the Auditor-General of Canada. The site, however, does not reveal the identity of the individual who made the edits.

Thankfully, it is not just Canadians who are shuffling the cards mid-game. The same report shows that the CIA is involved and it even “purportedly shows that the Vatican has edited entries about Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams.”

Excellent.

Five Up Again

Finally an exciting game with the Red Sox winning it in the ninth with Coco driving in Tek from second. Wooo. And the Yankees got blown away by Baltimore. Wooo. Except Boston was playing Tampa, the worst team in baseball. Hmmm. But their Kazmir was pitching, worthy on any roster. Wooo.

This is a funny season, perhaps one of transitions that no one wants to talk about – Shilling, Ortiz and Manny not being that young anymore – and a year that some of the recent acquisitions have pointed themselves out ans not being what they might have been – Drew and Willi Mo in particular. But the sluice gates of money have opened and the Red Sox will buy. Gagne was finally dominant yesterday in the eighth after two utter failures in Baltimore last weekend without which the Sox would be seven rather than five games up in mid-August.

And they are up five. Sure the Yankees decided to be Yankees finally, largely on the backs of young players on the mound and at the bat. The upcoming games are going to be interesting. Dice-K should crush Tampa and there is a double header tomorrow against the Angels, the evening game of which may see my new pal Clay Buchholz taking the mound. Hopefully, too, Baltimore will win again and Detroit will not suck and will take a few from the Yankees, too – especially as they face Bedard and Verlander in the next few games, two of the best pitchers in baseball.

Half The Point

This is an interesting article but not necessarily for the intended reasons:

Supreme Court of Canada Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin joined Ms. Robertson in her siege against a “business model” of operating law firms that is soul-destroying, outmoded and steadily driving women away from a private law practice. The business model typically involves an expectation that lawyers will put in 70 or 80-hour weeks and forgo their family lives in return for wealth and partnership status. Putting aside her prepared text in favour of an off-the-cuff analysis of the evolution of women’s battle to gain an equal place in the law, Chief Justice McLachlin said that for women, winning that legal right to become lawyers was only half the battle. More than half of law school graduates are now women, she said, yet they are grossly underrepresented in private law firms.

The funny thing is, of course, men are equally affected but sometimes it happens in ways we call success. Male or female, the pressured private lawyer can find themselves with no home life, drinking or simply losing it at work – and like any lawyer I have been witness to these breakdowns – but carries themselves as a business leader to the greater community and sometimes even at home. Massive accommodations at work are made all around the person but often the root cause is not to be addressed. What is the root cause? Often the burden of carrying the responsibility for solving horrible crises of other is just too much, often the expectation of a millionaire’s life-style is the cause of over-whelming debt. Often it is just too much for any reasonably balanced person.

The legal profession at least in Canada has followed down a path that allows it to characterize all this as unfair to women. I have no idea why it is not blindingly obvious as being unfair to men, too.

Group Project: Karl Rove

Here is an easy one for the dog days of summer: was Karl Rove a force for good or evil? Remember – on his way out he called you all “the mob” as in he was not going to leave at a time dictated by the mob. When was the last time a public official in a democracy could call the people “the mob”? Anyway, to stoke the question, here is a clip from the editorial from The New York Times:

Mr. Rove has stonewalled Congress’s legitimate efforts to investigate. Some of his key e-mail messages on the United States attorneys matter appear to have mysteriously disappeared, while others are being withheld with baseless claims of executive privilege. As for defying that Senate subpoena, some subjects might have been protected by privilege, but Mr. Rove’s refusal to show up at all is outrageous — although totally in keeping with his and his boss’s disdain for the separation of powers.Mr. Rove failed his own party, as well as the American people, when he counseled President Bush to turn every serious policy debate — Social Security, the war in Iraq, even terrorism — into one more political dogfight. Today, despite Mr. Rove’s claims of invincibility, both houses of Congress are back in Democratic hands, Mr. Bush’s approval ratings are around 30 percent and many Republican presidential candidates are running as fast as they can away from the Bush legacy.

Can anyone find a similarly sourced opinion that actually supports what the guy did? Isolated crackpot rural libertarian bloggers do not count, by the way.

Me? I agree with the disgusting politicization stuff. Thankfully we have had a degree of protection from that in recent years by the wonder that is minority government. People will say that the bureaucracy here is socialist Liberal but that really has not been the case since the Federal cuts began back in the mid-80s under Mulroney with the trains and post office, continued under Chretien with his slash and burn and continues with the present unFederalizing policy – though, granted, the Food Mail Program still exists. But this is not about me. It is about Karl and you.

By the way…you ever notice he has the same first name as Karl Marx? What the hell was wrong with Carl anyway?

GP rules apply. More here.

Important BBQ Knowledge

Via NYCO, and just for the record, this post is very important not because of its critique of the Dino BBQ but because of its identification of three more worthy WNY BBQ joints to explore:

But there I was, chewing on a rib as Harleys rumbled up and parked next to my outdoor table, thinking: Buffalo barbecue is this good. There might not be one place that’s as conspicuously a real, fun joint, but I’ll take the ribs at Suzy-Qs and Kentucky Greg’s or the brisket at One Eyed Jack’s over what the Dinosaur served me.

Buffalo Pundit provides more geographical and qualitative detail: “Tonawanda’s Suzy Q’s ribs (amazing), Lockport’s One Eyed Jack’s brisket (tender & smoky), and Cheektowaga’s Kentucky Greg’s ribs (quite excellent).” I can’t believe I was just in Lockport and my homing devices failed to alert me to a BBQ joint called “One Eyed Jack’s”.

Note in comments to BP: Sticky Lips BBQ on Culver, etc.

Why Does Convergence Fail?

…or is it just an attempt to cross-breed whales and goldfish? This article about NBC’s 600 million blown in trying to converge something with something else is illustrative:

Most embarrassing, an effort to increase traffic by introducing a syndicated television program, “iVillage Live,” resulted in a month-to-month drop in visitors to the iVillage Web site. Introduced last December, “iVillage Live,” carried on NBC-owned stations in 10 cities, was seen as a failure on its own, suffering from low ratings, poor production quality and a certain nagging cloying quality. It ceased production in June, but is still running in repeats and will return, after a full makeover, next month.

Running repeats. Excellent plan.

It reminded me for some reason that may not be exactly clear in my mind of the movie 24 Hour Party People that was on over the weekend about the rise and fall of mid-80s Manchester rave scene that spawned Happy Mondays and the use of ecstasy. Effectively paid for by New Order through flipping their record sales to subsidize the money pit of everything else, the movie notes how the entire time was a financial flop due to the failure of the clubs to control the actual money flow. Ravers bought drugs not beer. A bubble economy except for the pushers.

What they may have in common is the acceptance of the insistence that a concept is viable supporting external investment of money and other resources, including public interest.

As a general concept that may be useful and something that explains many things. David recently wrote a good comment here about to the effect that (because I can’t find it at the moe) through blogging he has come to the conclusion that people understand their own beliefs very poorly. Maybe this is the human condition, however, and that all things are bubbles to some degree as we thrive on hope and expectation more than knowledge.

Ontario: Wind And Sail Dark Ale, Barley Days Brewery, Picton

bdb1So what do I do when back from a beer hunt? Go beer shopping I guess. Barley Days Brewing on the west side of Picton is the resurrection of the former Glenora Springs brewery to the east side of Picton which had an unfortunate track record of unintended lambics noted here and here a year and a half ago. Well, on the way home we drove by the countryside brewery and the associated pub but when I saw a fresh six of their dark ale at the LCBO today I thought it was time to try it again given the new facility and, I am pretty sure, new management.

I am very glad I did. The beer pours an attractive chestnut ale under a rich fine tan head, cool in the 40s F, this dark ale has plenty of nutty grainy goodness along with a core of dry cocoa. While it has whisps of date and coffee, it lacks that dark raisin sweetness that you find in a lot of darks but that sets it a bit apart from other good Ontario dark ales like 10W30 by Neustadt and Stone Hammer Dark Ale by F+M. There is also a nice twiggy earthiness from the hopping that is very well balanced and reminds me a little of Ithaca’s brown, though lacking its lime tang, a jug of which I shared with Gary last weekend. Certainly superior to Hockley Dark, though a side by side of the four Ontarians would make for a worthy inquiry. And while it is still a Canadian government issue 5% beer, it would make a very good session ale.

So, well done Barley Days. I will try this again and likely next time as draft at the Kingston Brew Pub where I saw it was on tap the other night. And note the very specific local branding including the artwork of Manly MacDonald (1889-1971). If Ontario suffers one thing compared to our southern neighbours it is specific pride in actual local history. Growing up in Nova Scotia where every child and every corner is deeply soaked in the real if nasty and difficult past and, then, later living in PEI where history is actively suppressed in favour of #*&$^ Anne of Green Gables, a Victorian propaganda piece the successful infusion of which any totalitarian Ministry of Truth would admire, it is great to see the specifics of the beer attached to the specifics of the locality where it is made.