Category: Uncategorized

Friday For The First Stinking Hot Weekend

It’s the meteorological chitchat that keeps you coming back. I know it. We spend so much time looking forward to a bright hot day that you would think we would record them in binders like family albums, categorized by how nice the breezes were or how long the evening seemed to last. Tomorrow bodes very well. Perhaps 80F in April on a sunny Saturday. 70F this Friday evening. This very day. It’s the anti-blizzard weekend. The one you wanted on a Tuesday in late January.

  • I sure love it when people who accuse others of having no moral compass then have to admit that the guy was pretty much right. Oh, what a giggle we will have in the next era when we look back on these times.
  • I would have thought the whole “eating a replica of our bodies” might have been a bigger issue than the name.
  • SPACE BLOB!!!
  • I thought this was pretty funny. When to worry about the IT geeks planning to control your lives? When they say “…people are passionate about your product…” or “IZ: You mean enhance civilization, make it even better?” you know someone is quite enraptured by an impending cash-in.
  • In the same vein, when someone says “Can we just retire this stupid line of questioning once and for all?” after referring to “the straw man” you may need to realize they are facing an argument they don’t want to admit is lost due to the weight it places on the possibility of being enraptured by an impending cash-in.
  • Sometimes the things that got cashed-in die and, quite surprisingly, take 675 employees. Can you believe GeoCIties was bought for 2.9 billion ten years ago?
  • Not necessarily my deepest love with a french fry van – I reserve that for Colburne’s of Pembroke, Ontario – but certainly my first. Sitting on the wall at the Halifax central library having a Bud the Spud was a big part of my youth.
  • Why are we not hearing news item after news item about how Ford saw this coming, may well never ask for a penny of public money, is about to crush its competition through sheer prudence and actually makes cars people buy?

And you may ask yourself how do I work this BBQ? You may ask yourself where is my suntan lotion? And you may ask yourself where does that garden path go? Is this my beautiful yard?

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What Is A Canadian Citizenship Worth?

Quite a number of years ago, I check out a cousin’s child’s right to Canadian citizenship and, as the person in question was born somewhere else, they needed to assert their Canadianness before a certain date or lose it. Apparently the rules will tighten tomorrow:

April 17 marks the implementation of a new rule created by the Canadian government. If you are a Canadian living overseas, passing on your citizenship will now become more difficult: Your children won’t get a Canadian passport unless one of their parents was either born in Canada, or had become a citizen by immigrating into Canada. Many Canadians are up in arms about this, ex-pats in particular. But I didn’t even know about the rule changes until a friend in Toronto forwarded me a mass-circulated protest e-mail. The message vilifies the policy, suggesting that all children of Canadian have a “right” to Canadian citizenship — no matter where they are born — and is accompanied by the obligatory petition to sign and forward.

I have a second nationality so this sort of scrutiny does not seem odd to me. In the 80s, I applied for and got UK right of abode. Under the current UK rules, I am pretty sure l am able to still apply for full citizenship based on family ties but that is not absolutely clear to me due to the complexity of the rules. Plus, I may have to show I am of good character. I hope I qualify. Maybe these bloggy posts would be my downfall.

I think these sorts of things are good. I am reminded of that by the scandal in PEI related to the selling of citizenships leading to an impossible but for-profit local explosion of immigrant investors which has come to the point that a Minister of the Crown has told people involved to retain lawyers. Those out of pocket may have to wait years to even get their papers.

Wouldn’t it be better if we had a firm set of rules around these things and rules that were actually administered by the level of government responsible for citizenship? Wouldn’t it be nice to know your citizenship is worth something, that I have been part of a process that relates to, you know, ideas like good character?

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Again With The Whither The CBC On This Tough Day

So who do you blame? Who do you blame for the evaporation of much of the CBC today? Do you blame me who stopped watching and listening years ago and regularly disses it? For that you can pretty much blame Brent Bambury leaving the local CBC Ottawa drive home show as that was the last thing I would tune in for. Do you blame Stephen Harper? You could I suppose – but when people are losing their jobs all over the place, when private news and entertainment sources in Canada are closing – is every job at the CBC sacred and worthy of tax dollars? Harper himself would blame consumers – you – ultimately but that is part of his whole passive / aggressive love / hate thing that has worked out so well.

You know who I blame? Paul Martin and Stephane Dion – Tweedle dumb and Tweedle dumber. “WHAT???” you say with a high screechy voice? Yes, Martin and Dion. They had the nation handed to them as only a Liberal party leader can, they had the ability to continue in the steady (if sometimes slightly sticky) hand of Jean Chretien. But no. Martin has to wrestle the leadership away from Jean only to find he has no skill at being leader. And Dion has to run against Iggy only to discover that, zoot!, he is actually a goofball egghead. Had these two men not botched the natural governing party, we would not have the social and economic experimentations of our rural overlords. We would not be driven into deficit by the single decision to reduce the GST from 7% to 5%. Remember that? Would it have made a tick of difference to anything other than the emptying of Federal bank accounts had the GST stayed at 7%.

This is what happens in a leadership void whether a void created intentionally by the CPC which wants to prove that the Federal level is irrelevant or by the Grits who, until recently, apparently wanted to prove that they were. Don’t get me wrong. I think the CBC in large part created the wall that it is now slamming headlong into. It has a singular lack of vision and stilted stance on its own importance that stands out among public broadcasters and public institutions. I should be a fan of the mothership, a booster. But it failed me long ago. I feel very badly for those who will be out of work, perhaps including creative clever friends from that undergrad with the journalism school I attended all those years ago. Still, the CBC deserved and deserves better. Blame those who should have defended her and who should have been there in these dark days. Blame Martin and Dion and the Grits who supported them.

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Group Project: Is Twitter The New Gold Fish Eating Contest

I wonder about things. I wonder why I need so many half consumed jars of jam. I wonder why the rise of the internet, the economic bubble and its bursting are all related. I wonder why no one seems to notice that. And I wonder why Twitter is taking off, jumping the shark and about to become (in Mr. James’s words or – better – something like them) the usenet of the 2010’s. Remember usenet? It was so great. People being all Web 2.0 a decade and more before Web 2.0? Now people are being all 25% usenet fifteen years or more later. What is up?

Anyway, being ticked that the Whitehouse apparently really really discovered Twitter last night and finding 30 or so of the last 50 posts I had to wade through were about policy and Obama girls, I deleted that feed. I have been spending much of my Twitter time in the last two weeks deleting feeds. I even had a show trial of a brewer whose pace of twitting was far too manic. I bet that really stung. Being unhappy with Twitter has given rise to a few observations which I trust you will confirm in their entirety:

  • People consider the haiku moment of Twitter to be the restriction to 140 characters. I would prefer 50 characters myself. I had no idea that people could actually go on with only 140 units at their disposal.
  • Twitter is now full of spam. Twitter spam is of two sorts:repeating the posts of others when any one with any sense would plagiarizer a good idea and straight up commercial blabbery. Are people now so accustomed to spam that they don’t notice it is spam?
  • A more annoying constraint is the limit to the number of posts I can view meaning that a twitting blabber mouth can monopolize your view screen. I say view screen as it is a more accurate 1964 way of describing the screen you view. For you stuck in the 90s please refer to the GUI. If you post more than 4 times a day, you are cluttering your readers’ view screens.
  • There is something really really sad about news media discussing Twitter. But it might equally be said that it is very sad when bloggers write about Twitter.
  • Twitter is incredibly anti-social for social software. It is entirely isolating, insulating and, if one were hooked, immersing. Stephen Fry may well be playing out his addiction in public and one wonders what it means to “follow” 55,243 feeds. Surely, the format is simply broken at that point.

So, is Twitter the widget that is so simple yet dysfunctional that no one actually has to admit it does not really work except as a Borg training device?. And why is it so apt for people in the time of recession? What does it speak to in a time of doubt and uncertainty? Is it like Depression-era eating goldfish or dancing non-stop contests without a prize?

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Of Course – It Was The War On Red Tape!

Do we hate “red tape” as much as before? Is there still a general feeling that too much intervention is always wrong? Not a chance. This morning I think even Stephen Harper with his recent anti-libertarian and anti- classic liberal statements would be nodding in agreement with this passage from today’s New York Times editorial page:

The financial crisis, including what went wrong at A.I.G., is not just the result of a missing regulator, a gaping structural gap in the regulatory framework. Rather, it is rooted in the refusal of regulators, lawmakers and executive-branch officials to heed warnings about risks in the system and to use their powers to head them off. It is the result of antiregulatory bias and deregulatory zeal — ascendant over the last three decades, but especially prevalent in the last 10 years — that eclipsed not only rules and regulations, but the very will to regulate.

Now, to be fair, our rural overlords in their heart of hearts want to regulate things in our private lives that mostly don’t need regulating but the point is still valid. What is the most important word up there? Deregulatory? Bias? No, it’s “zeal” – that thing that can overcome good sense wherever you go. Why would you want a zealot to structure your law – whether financial regulations or social engineering – when you would not want to sit next to that person at a dinner party? Is it not the zealot’s lack of balance that gives us terrorism, obscenely sub-prime mortgages, mockery of the deaths of the weak, bifurcation of the community and the undermining of the long standing social principles and institutions which have served us so well? And blogging. Don’t forget in inanity of blogging. Could it be plainer? Is there anything behind social instability other than zeal? So, in this time of transition and reformation, ought we not drum out zealotry wherever it may be found? Is this not the cause of the next five year?

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Great Moments In Support Staff Career Building

Monday morning. No one like Monday morning but you can bet you like this Monday morning more than a certain somebody in Ottawa:

An aide in Mr. Petit’s Ottawa office said the MP was very busy, and would not likely have time for an interview to explain his comments.

Should we not feel for the backbencher’s aide? Are these not the jobs held by friends that people initially admire until that Saturday night dinner party where too much is poured? “Too busy,” he said, “Tell them I am very busy!!!” “More wine?” “Yes. Yes, please.”

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Friday Bullets For The Golden Age Of Orange

It was 1:22 am when the game ended. I only made it to about four overtimes listening on UConn’s radio AM 1080 out of Hartford but Syracuse won. So that was good. I thought I was staying up late to watch Cramer on John Stewart but that was a fold. I kept waiting for Cramer to say “but you don’t exactly treat your subject matter with full seriousness.” Nada. He rolled over and asked to have his tummy rubbed.

  • Dalek For Sale Update: “once. i. built. an. evil. em. pire. made. it. run. made. it. run. against. time…“
  • “Why Doesn’t The PM Understand?” Update: Apparently PM Harper takes the wrong road and blames consumers for the economic collapse…but then refuses to confirm that is what the secret speech was all about. Not the finance industry and certainly not economists. Average people. Nice.
  • I love this photo. It’s like Zep cross the space time continuum and left messages in the Italian sky of 1527.
  • Speaking of Cramer and who is to blame, I think these people are to blame. Blame the eggheads.
  • For all the gloating about new media, note how many papers are in trouble because of debt. And often debt that was incurred by non-news-people taking on newspapers. Blame convergence as much as anything.
  • Nice to see Joe grew up. But is this the biggest loser of a guy taking a “personal day” ever?
  • All of Charlie Brown is now online. Rejoice.

Gotta run. Up way too late.

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Either Really Healthy Or Really Weird

One thing that I think the internet may have done is tempered local weirdnesses about bad things. When I was a kid in the Annapolis Valley, the local AM radio stations would broadcast the fire alarm announcements as paid advertising. So, thirty four years ago, right in the middle of hearing the theme to The Greatest American Hero or “Island Girl” there would be the sound of a wind up fire alarm, the statement “the fire alarm in the Middleton Area is brought to you buy Smith’s Chev-Olds” a little ad and then the news that Mrs. Muldoon’s chicken shed burned down due to little Johnny playing with matches. If the fire news was good enough, people would get in their cars and go have a look see. When the Greenwood mall burned, the gawkers packed the highways and byways, likely impeding trucks providing mutual aid from outlying communities.

I thought of that when I heard about the new French-language obituary channel that is starting up in Quebec.

A Quebec businessman believes he has the perfect business to suit ageing, Baby Boomer viewers – an obituary channel. The country’s first television channel dedicated to funerals and mourning could start broadcasting as early as this summer, after the CRTC granted a licence for a regional Quebec cable channel called Je me souviens. The French-language station would broadcast obituaries, notices of hospitalization and messages of thanks and prayers.

It may come to English Canada, too. What a boon for the disaster mongers currently stuck cursing the sunny days on the weather channel. Guaranteed negative news to cluck over. Apparently the developer of the concept “the idea of putting obituaries on television came after he attended several funerals over the years that left him longing for more.”

There is something odd about this. And not just the obvious oddness. Does anyone think this is actually a bad plot of a sci-fi show and that somehow somewhere this will trigger the undead to be walking the streets?

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One Thing That Happens When A Movement Collapses

Are the profiteers all that are left? Ben relishes the self-promotion of one who will go nameless or the other who will go nameless but US conservatives seem to have fallen to the point that these are all there is left. In late 2004, I posted a few half based things about recovering the moral majority and one of the key points was to a regain a communications strategy on message. Obama may have done that with the hope, with the change and now well see how all that plays out in these the days of just the spare change. But those who go nameless are now pinching the last few coins, an echo of the departed, the voices of the hollowed hollow men, those who gifted the globe economic collapse. Having been built up by the cause they have nothing left once the cause is gone – and aren’t they, in fact, now more a barrier to the cause? The Flea doesn’t see it yet but no one would imagine Bush debating Michael Moore in 2003 out of some confused idea that promoting another’s self-promotion equates with national debate. The converse, especially after the collapse, is far less appealing. As Cheney would know, no one debates clowns.

So, how will they be asked to leave? When will their inertia leave them bound to Newton’s first law, still drifting along but slowly further away, receding after the tack turns the boat around? Who will be the spokes-folk for the next conservative agenda?

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