Tag: Non-partisan blog posts

Standard Form A-137: Bulletted Chat (Friday)

In this edition, I review what I did this week and find it lacking. After being confused and disappointed by Twitter, I was simultaneously invited to Facebook by men in Alberta and Norway and I took the bait. Now I have 18 friends. I wonder whether I really had friends at all before that point. Then I wonder what I am supposed to do with the thing now that I have 18 friends.

  • Update: What I believe.
  • Update: continue to pray as we plan for MaineCanoe 2007 next week. Note for future google searches, you can find Kingston Canoe events and opportunities here.
  • Back in the days before I had a blog, I used to buy the Economist quite regularly. I mainly liked the graphs and the funny captions under the photos of world leaders. Their essay on the fate of Paul Wolfowitz avoids much of the gobbledegook related to the cause:

    On May 14th, a report written by seven of the bank’s directors concluded that in the summer of 2005 he had broken the institution’s rules, breached his contract and fallen short of the high ethical standards of his office. All of this in an effort to appease Shaha Riza, his romantic partner, who was outraged that she would have to leave her job in the bank when he took his. He went to huge lengths to smooth his girlfriend’s exit, bowing to her demand for a substantial rise in pay, sharp annual increases and a big promotion (or two) on her return. He should never have put himself in the middle of the dispute, the report argued. He was only following the directors’ sketchy advice as he had understood it, Mr Wolfowitz insisted in reply.

    You got to hand it to the man. He has had two tasks in my experience of him, totally blew both and displayed an utterly pathetic understanding of both geo-politics and personal ethics, leaving nothing but disorder in his wake. Not bad.

  • Is it possible that the Canadian Parliament is in disarray because not one party and not one leader has one decent idea to latch on to?
  • A great day for the Sox and a great second game of the double header for former Jays starter and Sox benchman Eric Hinske. I’ve never seen a man happier to hit a home run, the two run tater that gave the win, and I have never seen a man hold on to a baseball for an out while slamming his face into the warning track and eating half a pound of dirt. Good to see.
  • What else does this list of nations have in common other than filtering internet use? Bad at ice hockey – some good at field hockey, though. More English colonies than French, oddly enough.

More later at the breaks no doubt. If it is warm somewhere, please waft the air our way. I am sick of the cold and dreary.

GM Decisions

A tough but perhaps telling comparison of neighbouring economies as GM pulls out of Massena, NY about two hours to the east but plans to expand in Niagara Falls, Ontario about the same distance as the crow flies to the west. The two plans are not related directly but we often assume that Canada is not in a competitive position in these sorts of things. But it takes doing as grannie might have said:

At GM’s massive assembly operations in Oshawa, workers agreed to outsource janitorial operations and eliminate an in-house construction crew in order to win investment. The Ontario and federal governments also backstopped the plan by providing $435-million (Canadian) for the project, which included investments at other GM operations in Ontario and several research and development projects at universities throughout the country.

Tough decisions in a shakey market. But at least get the spelling right, wouldja.

Share Your Regret

Sometimes there is nothing as dreary – or is it dour – as being Canadian and I think this featurette from the newly minted “Life” section in now extraordinarily baldy laid out national newspaper of Toronto The Globe and Mail yesterday exemplifies the point neatly:

Big or small, life altering or seemingly insignificant, lasting or fleeting – our regrets are a part of who we are.

Share your regret…

Why don’t they just ask people to count the number of pens almost out of ink in the kitchen drawer and share that, too. Maybe that one is being held in reserve for a bit of punch for the slow news dog days of summer.

What Is Going On This Morning?

That is sort of what this is all about. Wake up. Read the news. Figure out what is whacky and see if I can write something. It’s not so dumb.

It’s a bit interesting that the Prime Minister has used Parliamentary privilege to suspend a court case. I would presume, as an election is not strictly speaking a Parliamentary matter, that the matter is only on hold. Embarrassing if it picks up come the next election. But that is not that interesting unless you have a good set of books on Parliamentary privilege or have access to the factum with the written legal case to nose around in. The Sox and the Mets lost – not interesting even if the Tiger’s pitcher was throwing over 100 miles an hour late in the game. It’s been raining the perfect rain which is interesting now that the basil and tomatoes are up, too. Show soaking rain followed hours later by a nigh of pouring. Everything’ll pop once the sun comes out. Falwell dead. Not interesting though the gayness of Tinky Winky was interesting – best line from a comedian: “show me the gentials!” Canoes are cheaper in the States than in Canada – that is wrong yet interesting and I have to obey the mighty dollar. Please all pray for a high Canadian dollar in the next two weeks. Darwin’s letters now online. What took them so long? Not interesting. Exercise desk? Not. Dark matter found. Feh.

Better go to work.

Group Project: What Would You Do?

Being not a small person since I was little and perhaps having the look of someone whose soccer training might be transferrable to headbutting in a pinch, I have not had the need to deal with a moment like this since the horror that was the junior high locker room:

Before I had a chance to take a sip of my coffee, someone — I won’t name them here because it might only serve to make a bad situation worse — came up behind me, said hello, and then asked me about something I’d posted here about them on my weblog. I attempted to explain my reasons for making the post, but before I could finish they responded by saying “so you think you’re pretty fucking smart” and then took a swing at the full cup of coffee in my hand, spilling it across the counter and over my newspaper and breakfast. Without another word they went out the front door and sped off in their car.

I think Peter did everything right in calling the cops and, in a small place like PEI, not directly calling the guy out – except perhaps he failed to inquire in reply as to whether the gent thought he was King Shit, as we used to say in the Maritime school playground of my youth.

But what would you have done? We think of many a pithy retort or ninja move we might make but we never do. I’d be more inclined to spend a lifetime eating away at shoulda-woulda-coulda. Would your jammy bun have been launched in the guys face? Would you have done a dapper Patrick MacNee as John Steed and hooked his ankle with your cane on his way out the door sending him into the display case? If you blog, have you had such a moment?

And would you name the jerk?

Do I See Damn Lies?

Does anyone believe these stats about web use that are about?

About 5.9 million Canadians spent an average of 83 minutes each on MySpace in March, said Bryan Segal of comScore Canada Inc., which measures Internet traffic. Remarkably, three other properties in the social networking category attracted even more Canadians. Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Live Spaces drew in 39 per cent of online Canadians, followed by Google’s Blogger (29 per cent) and independently owned Facebook (28 per cent).

I don’t have a strong reaction to percentages of on-line Canadians but I have a hard time believing 5.9 million Canadians are on MySpace. Is it in a meaningful way? I mean aren’t we now in a Canada with 1.3 blogs for every person? Wasn’t that where the future was? But maybe it is so as we are told in 2005 an “estimated 16.8 million adult Canadians, or 68%, used the Internet for personal non-business reasons during the 12 months prior to the survey.”

Maybe it is true. Maybe I am just Oldie Oldson, blogging away when the fun is happening elsewhere. The kid with the walkie-talkie when everyone is locked up the a Commodore 64. Maybe things are really upside down:

Chris (Zeke) Hand, the owner of Zeke’s Gallery in Montreal, used to partake in after-work drinks several times a week when he worked in the music industry. He says the booze is better in the art world, but he’s now choosing to do more of his networking and socializing online on sites like LinkedIn and Facebook. “They are an alternate means to connect with people without the possibility of being thrown in jail,” he says.

On-line with now fear of being thrown in jail? Has even Pr0n lost its illicit attraction? Oh dear – not quite.

The Radishes Are Up

I do not particularly like radishes but I am glad they are there. They will pop out of the ground whatever the conditions well before anything else. Maybe it’s because they give you both the false senses that you are good at something and that you have a treat to look forward to…even though a radish would pretty much grow out of a concrete block and tastes like gasoline mixed with black pepper. I plant a milder variety called French Breakfast. It reminds me of the month or less that me and pals spent in Paris 21 years ago, practicing nutritional deficiency and borderline alcoholism. Maybe the seed hybridizer stayed at the same hotel with the surely staff and the meager meals and remembered when he named his radish.

My relationship to radishes reminds me of my relationship to TV. So far today I have read or heard two stories about the collapse of TV in America. Katie Couric is floundering and NBC is foundering…or maybe it’s the other way around. NBC is actually bringing back the Bionic Woman – even though it was only the second best bionic person TV show of all time. Comparatively, the Bosox are roaring ahead and TV ratings for the sport are strong as well. I appear, along with many others, to be choosing reality – as opposed to a sort of reality in news snippets, in a series or even that sort of W2 social networking where there is neither real society or work’s rewards. Baseball – the perfect passive participation activity in its association with truth, beauty and real skill – is rising up through the wasteland of quality multimedia contentlessness. One always hopes the next thing will be real and good and simple. Perhaps it will be.

Out back, there are a few struggling tomato seed sproutlings as well, near the radishes but under special plastic roofing suffering from the cold as well, needing the sort of attention no radish would demand. I have no idea if they will make it, given this colder sort of May. Probably a replanting is necessary. I hear, however, that a radish is quite good with cold olive oil. And cheese.

When I am At The Ballgame…

…I shall eat a hot dog. Nothing better to watch a crumbling home team better than by eating a hot dog. To be fair, tomorrow’s game will see Halliday on the mound so a Bosox loss would not be a fraud upon the gods but I will still root for the last knuckleballer and eat a hot dog and so will the lad. The selling of hot dogs is big stuff in MLB. The Mets apparently sell the most:

Shea Stadium leads all major league ballparks with annual consumption of more than 1.5 million hot dogs. (Yankee Stadium, interestingly enough, is not ranked among the top 10.) According to Aramark, most of Shea’s dogs are sold by 48 vendors who roam the stands, as opposed to concessionaires who sell from fixed locations. The average vendor sells 150 a game, and 10,000 to 12,000 a season. Working for commissions ranging from 13 percent to 16 percent depending on seniority, they can make $150 to $200 a game, and as much as $30,000 a season.

Some say it’s going to be a twenty buck dog but for me it is all about averages. In the next 30 days I plan to see MLB, Double A in Maine and a Watertown Wizards game just over the border and I shall eat a hot dog each time. I know the Watertown dogs are about two bucks so even if the wieners at Portland are six to eight, I think over all I can invest in the twenty dollar dog knowing that I can look over the end of it and seem Manny Ramerez about twenty feet away.

If you plan for these things, you can have these things. Apparently they may play the Canadian national anthem at Watertown, too. You just have to ask.

One Thing George Does Better

George gets a rough ride. For the most part he deserves it to one degree or another but this whole thing with the Queen is a bit much even for me:

He had stumbled on a line in his speech, saying that she had helped the United States “celebrate its bicentennial in 17…” Mr. Bush caught himself and corrected the date to 1976. He paused, winked, and looked to see if the Queen had taken offence.

Gee wizz. Can’t a guy get a break? Let’s be honest. He are some reasons a visit by HRH to my house would not go so well as a visit to the White House:

  • The teas is in a mug. Deal with it.
  • My daughter will ask “what’s with that hat?”
  • You may have to wait your turn.
  • Phil stays outside.

The last one is a biggie. And, yes, that’s a beer. Want one?

‘Sploding


Not to scale

Well, this was pretty good as things in the sky go but it would be better to have it visible in the sky. I mean when I was a kid there were still old folks who said when they were kids they saw Halley’s Comet in 1910 (or maybe the other one of that year) which meant when Comet Kohoutek went by in 1973, we thought the sky would be filled and went out in the back yard looking and looking and saw nothing. And when Halley’s came back in 1986 again I stood out looking and looking and maybe saw a smudge but probably not and then had better things to do. Heck, I’ve only caught the northern lights a few times and mainly they were green. Green. I mean whoopdie-do. Frankly, someone’s got some ‘splainin’ to do about the lack of sky ‘splosions.