What to do when your surplus reaches 10 billion? If it is in Federal coffers everyone says it’s not government money – give it to me, pay the debt, do this, do that. But when it is in Alberta’s hands it is not ours. It doesn’t really seem to be Albertans given the lack of public use the windfall from we buyers of fuel. Given that the price will only keep going up and given there is anywhere from a 50 to 200 year supply needing digging up…what to do with it all? Harper appears intent on removing that wealth from the equalization formula, too, while others foot the bill. Maybe they could create the Arctic navy.
String Fever
The Rukster has reminded me of my early steps into bluegrass. I wrote a brief summary of my place in my pickin’ and grinnin’ edjification:
I am following a similar path in bluegrass discovery, Peter, and I can heartily recommend String Fever on NCPR Thursdays 4 to 6 your time. It’s a local show on my local NPR station with an excellent name which it has inspired me to declare 2006 the year of the mandolin, but only if I learn ten licks on the guitar. All very diddly-diddly. Perhaps you now need to pick yourself a bluegrass name like “Slim” or “Del” if only to keep it private in your own thoughts.
I daydream now of mandolins and imagine myself like these folk in a future I am not certain can be attained. The other day I learned of the existence of the mandocellos and other points on the mandolin sliding scale. I have bought books of tablature with titles like Hot Licks for Bluegrass Guitar. I have a plan. I will go to Old Forge on the way home from Easter in Portland. I will pick up a mandolin and play a lick and say “that is one sweet mandolin” and I will buy it. How better to welcome my 43rd year later that week.
This all, however, may go off the rails as I learned last evening that I am going to see Queen in Toronto in three weeks with the brothers to renew our periodic rocking out as with Elvis Costello in July 2003 and the Pixies in November 2004.
Shadow Cabinet Note
Number 8 is off with Marie Jose as Bunny is off to the desert for a week. Igs is not getting the respect he deserves being made junior to Jack Sprat himself. No props for Slats.
#19 – Delighted I’m Sure
One might be forgiven for thinking that, all things considered, given the dearth of plausible candidates for the primus inter pares (or however the hell you spell it) spot in the Party, they might have given Iggy something which might have brought him to the attention of the Speaker more than once every six months.
It is not every day that we manage to find a bona fide intellectual – who published actual books rather than Pierre’s wee collection of pensees on Federalism culled from yesterday’s fish wrap – dumb enough to want to lead the party through the valley of debt to reach the delights of office a decade from now.
The Acting Leaderine is, I suspect, just a little envious. Not that he himself is a stranger to the book writing biz; but his only sales have been to captive law students looking to break the cycle of Wills and Trusts with the p&v of International Law. Actual people have bought, in rather satisfactory numbers, Iggy’s books.
Plus, and one cannot discount this, he has been an actual media star (I trust no one has mentioned that in Canada, so long as you have not actually written any books, that puts you in line to be GG not PM). One would think that the Leaderine would have remembered all this.
One might go further and point out that Slats, for all his prowess on the international hockey sheet – and his own rather popular books – is unlikely to be able to identify any foreign nation where hockey is not actually a part of the national religion. Iggy, on the other hand, has been almost Chatwinesque in his desire to visit the most maggot infested corners of this funny old world. He – and this no doubt knots the knickers of the Leaderine – actually has a clue and the clue is not the anti-American “personal security” cant which the Unworthy utters at such ponderous length from his Pacific perch.
I’m off for a quick dinner with Marie Jose…Bunny is in the Desert for the week. Hope she has fun – I know I will.
How Odd, Leah
My own problem with the blogosphere is not that it’s selling out to the mainstream, but that most of it is spectacularly boring. The dominant quality is tedium: writers without editors, fact-checkers or paying subscribers to keep them in check. As Butterworth succinctly puts it: “If the pornography of opinion doesn’t leave you longing for an eroticism of fact, the vast wasteland of verbiage produced by the relentless nature of blogging is the single greatest impediment to its seriousness as a medium.”
Given that I basically agree with that quotation (despite its horrendous, overly ripened condition) as recent discussions will confirm, I was saddened by the reference to David Eddie, author of the excellent Chump Change of about a decade ago:
But this doesn’t hold up in all cases. Take my friend and peer David Eddie. A Toronto-based novelist, journalist and screenwriter, Eddie maintains a blog at http://www.davideddie.com even though he invariably has several other professional writing projects on the go. When I ask him (slightly incredulously) why on Earth he would bother to write down his opinions for free, he shrugs. “It’s a good way to limber up. You get up in the morning, fire up a blog, write the thing in 15 minutes and then you know what’s on your mind. I think it was Nabokov who said, ‘How do I know what’s on my mind until I write it down?’ “
Unfortunately, the fact checkers failed this time to note that Mr. Eddie’s blog has been dead since Monday, October 17, 2005. What is the word for the status of one’s limber if not upped for four months?
Never mind. Soon it will be again as retro hip to say you blog as it is now to say they are worthless.
#18 – Critique Appointment Day
Interim Leader did well. I like my job just fine. Reminds me of 1986 even if it wasn’t the longest post I held. Some surprise that I got it and some surprises for thems that didn’t get anything. Bit more of an office than I fear though less than I had had. But that’s the way it goes.
Bit of a sour look from Major Announcement himself, but after Defence you would expect that was was a bit of a shock. Not such interesting junkets. Brains Ignatieff certainly can expect quite an education care of Geoff Regan. Good Lord, that should be entertaining to watch. Jack Sprat. That’s what I’ll call him. He’ll get that one right away. Regan will be retired before he clues in. Slats Dryden is a bit of a shocker – Foreign Affairs. Almost as much of a shock that MacKay got that Ministry in the first place. Maybe he’ll befuddle the man from Pictou with the well placed signed rookie card. I bet MacKay still has his cards. He has that look about him.
Man Is The Measure Of All Things
Here is my half-baked unified theory essay based largely on idle car driving and long meeting daydreaming. Entire chunks could be rewritten and reversed, deleted even. I am too lazy to edit it any more and I am note convinced myself but, thought I, what the heck. I’m posting it for comment but given that I am calling it half-baked I would expect that the comment would not be of the “yor a moeron” sort. Pick out what you like, mix and match, compare and contrast.
I don’t know why the opening of Jane Taber’s column in the Globe and Mail last Saturday has clung to the back of my mind:
Prime Minister Stephen Harper spent last Saturday night at 24 Sussex Dr. fiddling with the TV, trying desperately to find the channel that carried Ben and Rachel’s favourite show, The Forest Rangers. It was the Harper family’s first Saturday night at the Prime Minister’s official residence — the family of four and their two beloved cats moved in just two days before — and the cable wasn’t hooked up. “I told Stephen I would arrange the channels on Monday, and he said, ‘No, let’s do it right now,’ ” Laureen Harper wrote in an e-mail this week. The Prime Minister proceeded to call the cable company…
It is not a sour thought at the sight of a Dad trying without any luck to figure out the electronics or a hapless moment for the new PM that saddens me. It’s that it was The Forest Rangers. Secretly, I hope it is a remake I have not heard of but I suspect it is that same show that was never part of my growing up – because even at 42 it was before my time. I suppose what makes me really sad is that in the last four and a half decades of entertainment communications there is nothing better for a couple of kids to watch than the show that made The Beachcombers seem like Shakespeare – even if their parents hold a pretty tight rein on the TV’s remote control. But I doubt it. Who would remake the Forest Rangers? Who now could?
Is this another post about the false promise of recent changes in mass communications? I suppose it is. This weekend, taking in a movie in a 1930s cinema as well as an excellent live hockey game, I was struck like I should not have been struck how the digital advance is something of a regression. We have a population that has, say, doubled in the last so many decades but the volume and variety of entertainments has exploded. And, while the technological advances have been impressive, has the content kept up? Is it possible that there could be so many more things with which to be entertained or informed without a relative dilution of the actual quality of content?
What have we given up due to the dilution? Audio fidelity in favour of tiny ear plugs. The ability to value excellence in favour of the ability to value what we choose or, worse, what we do. Even TV as a topic for water cooler talk is dumped in favour of the replacement of water cooler talk, the SuperNetWay. We have exchanged audience for authorship and awarded each of ourselves the same prize. Except maybe for Harper as Dad. For him there is that world of kids playing in a fort (without any explanation of who maintains it and on what budget) and helping with some sort of government administrative function in relation to lands and forests (despite the child labour laws). There is something back there in that show which is not here – the suspension of disbelief, that awareness that what your are taking is has acceptable flaws.
But we are such mooks now – suckered by belief in whatever we have placed before ourselves. All it takes is for a new self-flattering toy or medium to come along to make ourselves earnestly believe we must have it. And so with politics – we are so determined to be a vital player in the administration of government that we value our whim is as good as a policy borne of the toil of hundreds and the rulings of decades. We can no longer suspend our disbelief as consumers or citizens but are locked into our own certainty in relation to all things, creating a flat world where anything is pretty much as good as any other thing. We cannot defer. We must each be authority if we are also the personalize me. So no journalist is worth their salt, no policy can be trusted, no means to assert our own personal dominion of expression can dared be passed up. We each pick at the world yet pick each our own world. Less shared, less trusted. More me-like-ness.
Sometimes I think that the few years of this millenium have seen two changes which have melded unexpectedly: the rise of networked information technology and the rise of the fear and the security demand in response to terrorism despite almost five years now passing since, hopefully, the anomaly of 9/11 that shook us out of the sleep and pattern of tens upon tens being blown up here and there on a regular basis between nation upon nation, tribe upon tribe genocides. We can forget sometimes that there was life and community and many of the same problems in 2000, 1999 and before. We trick ourselves that all has been changed. About a year ago I wondered if we were post post 9/11. I wondered it again a few months later, the day before the bombings in London. But maybe the trick is on us, that the uni-mind of internet and homogenization of shared concern has left us burned a bit, blurred a bit even as we technologically assert our individual autonomy. So concerned with our fear of flying – even while we are on the ground – that we now have met unending earnestness and each of us shaken hands with it and made it our own. I thought there was an end to irony in the weeks after September 11th but now I think we lost more than just that as tools of surveillance and information merge in the one screen wired to the network, taking and giving, providing what we can say we have made up ourselves. We must believe now, nothing left to be suspended. Where would you stand during the suspension?
What to do? Doesn’t anyone think this is just a town full of losers to be blown out of? Maybe Steve does. Is the Harper family gathering around the black and white world of the past one way to assert the contrarian way? I still think it is a little sad but I don’t know why exactly. I wish them well.