The Final First Friday Of A Month Of 2006 Chat

I remember like it was yesterday that it was recently not now but that was a lot longer ago than I recall.

What is going on? It is a moving day for someone I know and I am lending a hand so a half day. It is also a double party evening. It’s been so long since one of them came a long I can’t recall how they work. Sweater vest and red tie for the first, ball cap and mandolin for the latter. Have we discussed “mand-o-lin”: violin for the hands, no?

  • Old logo good, new logo swooptastic!!!
  • This is neat if you have a British last name as illustrated by “Campbell” here.
  • This is just weird:

    When Christopher Fleming-Brown, a banker living in the exclusive area of Kensington, London, kicked a ball about with his five year-old son in a large private garden communally owned by the houses in his crescent, little did he know he would later face a two year court battle for inadvertently turning the garden into “a public recreation ground,” contrary to the Town Gardens Protection Act 1863…[because]…[l]ast November, a magistrate court held that this game did not constitute football, as there were no ‘teams’ involved. According to the present law, they concluded, teams means football…

    What!!! I am not one to just on the “Europe is dying” bandwagon but this is just…what…they appealed?

    This week, on her appeal, the High Court decided that Mr Fleming-Brown’s game had amounted to football, with Mr Lord Justice Waller saying that “By any common-sensical, natural interpretation the respondent and his son were playing football or a similar game.”

    Well that’s alright then.

  • Well, I suppose I better make my call on the Liberal Leadership Campaign:
    • Iggy – The Grit Stockwell Day. Day was elected, Iggy might be too. It will be weirder for a while and then it will be over.
    • Rae – the nicest guy in Canadian politics. If he wins I might vote for him as I have usually voted for some version of a soft socialist with a faint hope of winning power. Experience and I expect him to give a great speech. My hometown Senator Hugh made the point that few of the candidates have ever spoken to a crowd of 5,000. Rae has.
    • Dion – I don’t know that he has done anything to attract the attention of anyone who isn’t supporting him. Is he a Grit policy wonk?
    • Kennedy – less a no-chancer than three weeks ago but corduroy jackets are so 1974 and also 1994. He would probably make a good leader but he can make a good leader next time. They have to vote for someone who can win in six months.
    • Dryden – he played hockey, right?
    • The others – there are others?
    • I will likely track tomorrow’s second to sixth voting rounds via the radio.

  • Big brother has been watching…no, really – he’s my big brother…has been watching events and implications of the great “Wuzza nation?” debate and considers how nations have hockey teams so Quebec may now need one, too.
  • A freaky weather event may happen down our way later today:

    NORTHEAST WINDS AHEAD OF THE LOW PRESSURE AREA WILL DRAW DOWN THE WATER LEVELS ON EASTERN LAKE ERIE…BY ABOUT 2 FEET. THE SUDDEN SHIFT IN WINDS ALONG THE LENGTH OF LAKE ERIE AS THE COLD FRONT PASSES BY WILL LIKELY SET UP PRONOUNCED SEICH AND FORECAST PRODUCTS ARE SHOWING A RISE OF 8 FEET FROM THE LOWERED WATER LEVEL TO THE HIGHER WATER AS THE LAKE SHLOSHES BACK. A LAKESHORE FLOOD WARNING WILL BE IN EFFECT FOR LAKE ERIE FOR THIS EVENING. LAKE RISES ARE POSSIBLE ON LAKE ONTARIO AS WELL…AS THIS STORM PATTERN IS SIMILAR TO AN EVENT IN FEBRUARY 2006. WATER LEVELS ALONG THE EASTERN SHORE OF LAKE ONTARIO AND THE UPPER SAINT LAWRENCE RIVER ROSE A COUPLE OF FEET FROM OSWEGO TO CAPE VINCENT AND DOWNSTREAM TO ALEXANDRIA BAY ON THE RIVER.

    Freaky. I wish there were some sort of over the counter product to deal with “PRONOUNCED SEICH”. On the upside, this is a rare boogie boarding opportunity.

  • I will go to the Dinosaur BBQ again. I do not care. I ♥ it.

That is it. Gotta go. That must be enough. Can’t you stop emailing me? Someone is at the door. What? WHAT??? Argghhhhhh!!!….

[Exeunt. Ovation. Bows. Exeunt. Fin.]

Did Someone Say “Olympic Boycott”?

Been a long time since we have had an Olympic boycott based on political dispute. Surely it must be time now if only due to the passing of time and the natural lapse of memory. And surely we should be able to take the foot off the clutch and call for one if we are truly going to lead the way on human rights in China. Because that is what we are going to do, right?:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper says his government will not abandon “important Canadian values” by toning down criticisms of China’s human rights record to improve trade relations with Beijing. Harper made the comments to reporters on Wednesday after being apparently snubbed by Chinese President Hu Jintao.

Just wonder, you know, what important Canadian values we might be discussing and whether they get us all the way through the game of chess or whether we just give them an airing now and then.

Zip There And Back

…chich-a-tee-chick-chich-a-tee-chick-chich-a-tee-chick-chich-a-tee-chick…

You know why Trudeau should have gone all France and built that high speed train in the Quebec-Windsor corridor?

…chich-a-tee-chick-chich-a-tee-chick-chich-a-tee-chick-chich-a-tee-chick…

So I did not have to get up at 4:30 am to be in downtown Toronto for 9:00 am. It’s about privacy law so I can’t get into the details of the course…GET IT??? That is the sort of joke I heard twice today. So there will be no pithy comment in the morning. No noting that Harper is now back to unloved and has no buddies with any pull in the US that like him more than they love Bob Rae.

…chich-a-tee-chick-chich-a-tee-chick-chich-a-tee-chick-chich-a-tee-chick…

It’s that different now. Bob Rae goes to Washington 1 January 2007? “Comrade!!! is all you will hear echoing throughout Congress. Clinking glasses as the brass bands play The International and everyone shouting “Comrade!!! as they kiss each other’s cheeks.

…chich-a-tee-chick-chich-a-tee-chick-chich-a-tee-chick-chich-a-tee-chick…

Harper? What will he be greeted with in Washington after 1 January 2007? Somewhere between tumbling tumbleweeds and Deadwood. The unloved. Will it really be over that quickly? How delish. Yet…I will not go there tomorrow. I won’t. I can’t. No, I will be on a train between Belleville and Cobourg and you will not even be out of the Land o’ Nod.

…chich-a-tee-chick-chich-a-tee-chick-chich-a-tee-chick-chich-a-tee-chick…

That is why Canada needed that high speed train in the Quebec-Windsor corridor to be built back in 1983.

…chich-a-tee-chick-chich-a-tee-chick-chich-a-tee-chick-chich-a-tee-chick…

Nationalism

I do not know what to make of this:

Morale plummeted inside the campaign after the remarks and Mr. Ignatieff’s perceived clumsiness in dealing with the fallout from them. But it rebounded after Quebec Liberals received him with enthusiasm and echoed his call for recognizing Quebec as a nation within Canada.

On the one hand, being a Scot, I am well versed in the arguments for nation. It’s in Flower of Scotland, the anthem we hum as we make the coffee in the morning, it’s in Scot Wa Hae the poem we all recite between dinner and our wee bit of pudding. It’s in the very food, which is based as Mike Myers once said, on a dare. Pretty much everyone knows about the claim and call to Scots nation and why and what it is based on. So I have never understood why the details of Quebec’s claim is so not notorious, its Sancho Panzas as well known Bonnie Prince Charlie. What makes it a nation in the way that, say, the Western Sahara is (except no one will fully back them up)?

On the other hand, what is the big deal? If Quebec wants to be a nation within a nation, what do I care. Newfoundland already is for all practical purposes at least on a cultural level – not to mention PEI and Alberta pretend they are. Heck, Nova Scotian led the first separatist movement, right after Confederation. How do I lose out from an asymetrical confederation? Isn’t it pretty much the same argument over same-sex marriage, that “they” will alter something undefinable in relation to “us”? Unevenness abounds as far as I can tell – Rhode Island gets the same two senators that California does. Alberta flukes into boundaries which encase the nation’s oil deposits and plays grumpy child with the only ball in the schoolyard. What makes it so wrong?

Those are a lot of questions. And good questions. And tough questions. I have another. Can Iggy get them all in order, get them under control to pull his campaign up in these last few weeks?

Green Garth?

Amid the gnashing of Tory teeth over their own decision to turf Garth Turner has popped up the delicious idea that our former Finance Minister will now become Canada’s first member of Parliament for the Greens. Sure it came from brother Doug, usually not a hot national news source despite his location, but it is an attractive idea.

  • First, Garth blogs (though as ST notes, he may well also edit.) Tories do not blog – Monty had to quit blogging when he got to sit at the big table. Reasonable policy for an unknown medium run by hobbyists as far as I see but Garth needed to express himself. You can’t fight for the little guy and hide your light under a bush, you know.
  • Second, Garth may find the idea of protecting the environment through “intensity” standards a joke. That may not make him particularized enough to be a Green – as it seems to include most of Quebec again now – but I suspect all Greens fall into that larger category.
  • Third, Garth is a showman. Love it or hate it, he loves the camera and the camera has certain feelings for him. He was a TV investment guru in the 1990s after he was Minister of Finance for, what, a month or so and he found a way to fill an hour before the reruns of Xena on the CHCH Hamilton mid-Saturday afternoon TV schedule.

So go Green, Garth. Become the new Deb Grey before leading your cause into a decade and an half of splintering schismismistic madness. Find a way to forge a sixth party in Parliament and lay the groundwork for the seventh. And maybe co-opt Elsie Wayne to join you. Nobody makes for a great schism as well as Elsie does.

Friday Left Margin Blob Talk Time

Well, that is another week in the books. My halfth birthday is past history now, the Mets are out and there is a bed sheet ghost hanging in the tree out front. What a game that was last night – tied from the first to the ninth 1-1, then the Cards pull ahead in their last at bats and the Mets lose with the bases loaded after a kid…ok, a guy with a beard…smokes one past a multi-millionaire who was fooled and frozed where he stood, only able to watch the curving ball enter the strike zone and then the catcher’s glove. The game featured the greatest double play last night with the Met’s Chavez (a former Expo, portland pointed out) robbing a guy out in left by snabbing the ball way over the wall then having the presence of mind to drill it back in to the relay man who got it to first. WHAMMO!

  • Update: having a good argument here with good folks who think we need a dutiful or responsible press. I think they are being nutty but I side with the rabble in most things.
  • In the impending gap in life called the baseball off season, you should be brushing up on the knowledge you need. The Baseball Hall of Fame has an email newsletter that you can sign up for.
  • Go read Gary’s blog. He is starting to describe the work of potters he admires. It is knowledge sharing time and it is very interesting.
  • The Tories have a green plan. Let me be the first to dub it the Tom Green Plan – hey, I didn’t know he was born in Pembroke. I have to wait longer than I have lived, until 2050, for this policy goal to be achieved. Nothing like an ambitious plan. They wait for a decade to start. Andrew Coyne, looking alarmingly like a man who know he was being an embarassing party lapdog, was on the CBC national last night saying how waiting ten years is just like starting soon and a plan that waits longer than my lifetime to date (and I am an old fart) to kick in is pretty much like one diligently pursued and aggressively implemented. They think we are dopes. They are starting to look like one-termers, history blips, modern-day John Abbotts.
  • Did you know you are wicked and bad? Almost everything is bad:

    While he did not specifically mention gay marriage, thousands of listeners at the fairgrounds in Verona’s outskirts strongly applauded the two parts of his speech about the family and “other forms of unions”. He urged them to fight “with determination … the risk of political and legislative decisions that contradict fundamental values and anthropological and ethical principles rooted in human nature”. The Pope said they had to defend “the family based on matrimony, opposing the introduction of laws on other forms of unions which would only destabilise it and obscure its special character and its social role, which has no substitute”.

    Each and every one of you are going to hell. Especially you!

  • Today is my answering the phone day at NCPR. I even got a confirmation card in the mail. So pledge between 3 to 5 and you will get to talk to me. I am taking the camera so as to have a scrapbook tomorrow, a photo montage as it were, maybe a even a three dimensional mobile of events. Interesting when someone asked how long it would take to go that far south, I got to reply that I am heading north-east to Canton, New York.

Gotta run. I have to remember the border papers. I think I will do the entire border crossing with a Flemish or Maltese accent just to see it that messes them up. Or maybe just answer every question put to me with “how the hell do I know?!?!” in a slightly loud voice. Whaddya think? Maybe include a five dollar bill when I pass over my papers. Just to smooth things out. You know.

Procedure? What Procedure?

I take no position on the decision made. But I find this description of how the decision was made a little odd:

The motion came as a “surprise” to the national caucus this morning, but Jaffer said it was not “unexpected” and the caucus was unanimous in supporting the “democratic” decision of its Ontario arm. The Prime Ministers Office insisted it played no role in the decision.

So if you are leader of a party or the caucus of the party, you take no role in substantively making a decision, relying on the “local arm” to play out the democratic function. I have to ask the good and thoughtful Mr. Taylor, Canada’s nicest ToryTM about the rule used in this instance. Note that Mr. Taylor has already posted excellent and – one might be drawn to suggest – almost insider information.

Friday: Chat. Pleeeeeeeeeeese.

Is it summer or fall? I have no idea. I put the furnace on last evening as much to deal with the damp from the rain. It worked. It worked without making a clang, a thump or a low grinding noise of any sort.

  • This will likely be the news of the day as reported in the Times of India:

    Islamabad’s delicate ties with the United States is threatening to come apart at the seams after it was revealed Thursday that the Bush administration threatened to bomb Pakistan into the ”stone age” if it did not cooperate in the war on terror after 9/11.

    If it actually was said, one has to admire what can only be a Frintstones reference working its way into global politics. Given that the government of Pakistan has now signed a cease-fire deal with Taliban militants in North Waziristan, one should pay attention to Pakistan’s military ruler Pervez Musharraf a little more closely than we may have been.

  • Last night, the Red Sox played the game that they wished they had played all year, beating Minnesota six to nuttin’. Big Papi got two homers and Josh Beckett was incredibly sharp for an eight-inning shutout performance. Beckett had the string on the ball thing happening, pulling inside fastballs back to just nick the plate.
  • I want my roll-up computer monitor. Life will be better with a roll-up computer monitor.
  • I think Steve did a good job:

    The Prime Minister made the remarks yesterday during his maiden UN speech, which he also used to reinforce the challenges faced in rebuilding Afghanistan and rooting out the Taliban. He said the world community must stay united, lest division make the mission harder for Canada, which has 2,300 troops in the country and will soon have 2,500. “We have no illusions about the difficulties that still lie before us,” Mr. Harper said. “Difficulties don’t daunt us. But lack of common purpose and will in this body would.”

    Interesting to note the demand that everyone seems to have all of a sudden to make the UN work. So much for rejection of world order. Conversly, I had an Ezra Levant article imposed upon me in on of those legal trade magazines yesterday going on dopey-wise about how the supposedly successful Isreali battle in Lebanon this summer showed how international law and action is a fraud – no one told the nation apparently. I guess there was some delay between writing and publishing or maybe just a delay between brain and keyboard. But I suppose when you can come up with great junior-high phrases like “moral ghoulishness” and then build a political theory around it, you have to be given newspaper and magazine column space…right? This one is gold: “Are you a September 10th person or a September 11th person?” By this he clearly means do you agree with me or disagree with me but loads the latter with a truck load of moral superiority that cannot be questioned. Go ahead and question…and watch out for people who award themselves the moral gold star in any discussion.

  • Somewhere there is a scientist saying “why do magnets always get the rap? This had nothing to do with magnets yet there it is: Magnetic train crashes in Germany“. Time we spoke out against the thin veneer that rests over the anti-magnetism we all share but speak not of.

That’s it – gotta go to work now.

Never Was A Friday Chat So Richly Deserved

The whole concept of TGIF has been laid aside somewhat since the disco era. Something happened around the time the Smashing Pumpkins were being miserable. I think it was then because when the Smiths were miserable at least you could still dance to it even if you had to try a little too hard sometimes.

  • Update: What is it with today that there is muchly going on? Anyway, here is another lunchy update. John Gushue has provided this excellent passage on the Colbert Report‘s addressing o’ the nuttiness that is wikipedia and its attack on reason in favour of buying bulk:

    Over the last month, Colbert has given us another gem: wikiality. “What we’re doing is bringing democracy to knowledge,” Colbert said on his July 31 episode, as he introduced the word. He then invited his viewers to log on to Wikipedia – the open-source encyclopedia that allows any user to edit most any document – and write that the population of elephants had actually tripled in the last six months.

    The population of elephants has in fact declined, but Colbert – the persona, it should be remembered – argued that environmentalists could be corrected on anything if enough people said it was so. Colbert’s fans – heroes, he calls them – did so, with enough volume to crash the site temporarily, and (more enduringly prompting Wikipedia to lock down almost two dozen articles containing data about elephants.

    Colbert made his point, but that was just the start. A month of so after it was coined, “wikiality” at this writing returns more than 290,000 hits on Google, and has spawned a funny site by that name. (With, yes, a full – and fictitious – entry on elephants.) The so-called Web 2.0 revolution has been made fun of before, but never so sharply or so well.

    “Wikiality” now joins Web Twenny as my favorite “new era” commentaries.

    One further thought: won’t it be nice when we soon have a word for the sort of dope who believes what is read on a blog over authoritative sources? I suspect that will be one characteristic of the impending but not yet here new broader era of post-post-9/11 thinking. We are still, as you know, locked into the many forms of gullibility in the pre-post-post-9/11 world that that terrible tragedy unleashed as one of its many unanticipatible, incoherent and tangential off-spring. I am thinking of a word. It might be “clog” but I sorta used that up with the concept of “clogging” though they are not unrelated.

  • Update: David Frum just said this on NPR’s The Connection:

    Military action has a better record of solving problems than social work does.

    Exactly one pack o’ lie. If you, as it is reasonable to do, include social welfare and public health in the concept of social work, this is the classic example of an unchallenged toss-off line that a guy like Frum uses as a bullying smoke screen hovering above his eloquent vacuity. He moves on to pose the argument that if you do not have regard for the policies of George Bush, you cannot have regard for human life. Dopery. Next time you are with Frum, please ask him to slow down and explain himself before he moves on to the next unfounded postulate. It is a technique that would make the finest used car salesman blush.

  • Update: Nicholas quotes a quotable quotation about blogging that is worth a link and a repeat:

    Sadly, I’m willing to bet a fairly hefty sum of money that almost none of the [. . .] bloggers who linked to it originally will link to my attempts to rectify their misunderstanding. Because after all the point of blogging is not to have an interesting discussion; it is to make fun of people who don’t agree with us, in the company of like-minded companions who will reinforce our conviction that other opinions are risible. But we’ll know, won’t we, dear reader. And the important thing, of course, is that we all agree . . .

    I have had to use and separatelty defend the use of my manners policy this week and I am happy to do so. I believe that there is a place between demanding and enforcing gawk-jawed fawning acceptance of the blogger’s party line on the one hand and, on the other, promoting mean-spirited auslandering and screaming finger-pointery of any and all. That zone is called civil discourse and that is that thing I want here. It is ok, therefore and because the world is full of them, to call some one a dope and their ideas dopey but only if you can support the allegation with supportable examples and links to evidence. It is never right to call someone a mother(#&$*&ing dope even if you have such examples. Fair?

  • Gary remembered the Pretenders this week which was definitely a band that you could dance to as you were thinking about how Monday took you back to the chain gang. Both their self-titled first album in high school and Learning to Crawl nearing the end of undergrad were massively important.
  • Speaking of undergrad, I started it 25 years ago this week. That is uncomfortably more than Oldie Olson when I think of it. I remember thinking I was getting creeky when I hit 25. Jeesh.
  • So what if we are chilling the relationship with China? It is a totalitarian dictatorship. That should be a simple, straight-forward rule. No kissy face with dictatorships. And while we are at it, how about doing it with these guys, too.
  • Is modernity getting you down?

    The fast pace of modern life is the biggest health worry, a survey says. The public cited lack of exercise, lack of sleep, fatigue and stress in their top five concerns with passive smoking and drinking much lower down the chart.

    I have a trick. Ignore expectations. And now that I am truly Oldie Olson, I can be left alone to do so. For years I was a junior slob, a man ahead of my time in terms of going to seed. Now my age is catching up to me and I am thinking that middle age is the true era for Gen X slackers. Like childhood, it is an era in which much is done to you. Unlike childhood you have a credit card and know how to use dirty words usefully.

  • This is actually interesting. One of the reasons we have shock of the new is that the internet for a long time has effectively erased the past by not archiving pre-digital era events in a handy-dandy fashion. Through YouTube we have regained the videos of our youth and Google has now launched the Google News Archive Search which apparently goes back 200 years. Soon I will be able to meet my old anxtity youthful self on the internet so that we can look at each other and call each other losers.
  • Watching local New York state TV as I do – as I am doing – I am getting the election ads and I have to admit watching ads with strong leaders without right wing agendas is quite refreshing. Say what you like as you demonize Hillary Clinton, she is a shoe-in for repeat Senator due to her hard work as a local representative for the state. The funniest thing is people who thought she was a carpet bagger. No one with the name Clinton can be a carpet bagger in upstate New York as far as I can tell.

Must run now as I leave you earlier to hoist weights each morning. I am aware that “hoisting” implies something more than the actual weight I throw around but if I use words like “hoisting” and “throwing around” it sounds cooler and more effective than it actually is.