Tag: Non-partisan blog posts

Election 2007 Watch: What Sport!

The Globe is all a flutter this morning that we may be days or weeks away from an early Federal election call. Seeing as I love elections of any sort this would be a great thing. Sure we would only have another minority government of some kind but apparently that is all Canadians are still comfortable with. Here is my summation of where we are at:

  • I particularly welcome a referendum on the leaders and an opportunity for the Greens to see if they can get a seat or two.
  • Even though I think some policies have been flip-flops, wasteful, silly or worse at least the Conservatives have broken the soap opera cycle of the Grits interior battles between the Jeans and the Pauls. The year has been one of a certain stolid dignity as well as some advancement by the government of good ideas among the odd so pretty good – as long as you don’t actually have to work, say, for a member of cabinet or anything and have to put up with the PMO control freaks.
  • The anti-Dion ads have only bolstered his position and I think in retrospect they may be seen as a foolish error. Arguing about things Liberals did in 1995-2003 will not work now either. They may be back on track to recreate themselves. Having Mr. Rae stick around as a policy geek is going to be very handy. I wonder if he will run for a seat.
  • My estimation of Mr. Layton has fallen since Ed Broadbent has not been in caucus to shout “SUCK IT UP!” at him every six minutes. The NDP will have to do something extraordinary to reclaim my vote of habit.
  • Elizabeth May should be in the TV debates. I am quite pleased with the change in the Green Party since Mr. Last Guy left – and it is one I have voted for in the past.
  • Bloc? There is a chance that they will get a lower percentage of votes in Quebec than Harper will outside of Alberta. That will be a bit of a change.

What do you think? Have anything so seriously changed that you would change your vote? I am very much thinking of moving my wee “X” this time around. But I have no idea where. Persuade me.

First Friday of February Chat

Another gentle dawn. Another month.

Friday this week finds us in a full fledged debate on who is most green. I have no idea why as I have resigned myself to ecological disaster a few short centuries after I am gone, sometime after the Venusians get us all and align themselves with our cats.

  • Green is Canada’s new story on the global scene – forget what was said a few weeks ago, please. And it makes strange bed fellows – forget the labour management divisions of the past. I still can’t figure out why our Prime Minister’s conversion on the road to Damascus or at least the next election is not being called a flop-a-rama of the highest order.
  • It is extraordinary in this day that people in leadership positions can say such dumb things.
  • I am not one to reach for the Attends every time the twits at BoingBoing announce the GroupThink of the day but no doubt there is much foaming over the embarrassment that is the NFL’s demands that churches limit the screens they show TV shows on to 55 inches, as the ever excellent Deadspin cuts and pastes:

    Initially, the league objected to the church’s plan to charge partygoers a fee to attend and that the church used the license-protected words “Super Bowl” in its promotions. Newland told the NFL his church would not charge partygoers — the fee had been intended only to pay for snacks — and that it would drop the use of the forbidden words. But the NFL wouldn’t bite. It objected to the church’s plans to use a projector to show the game on what effectively was a 12-foot-wide screen. It said the law limits the church to one TV no bigger than 55 inches.

    The law? What law? The license between the NFL and the calbe network perhaps but show me the red hand with the pointy finger next to “55 inches” please in the terms and conditions of my cable TV agreement. I declare Sunday group projection TV night. Fight the power! Fight the power that restricts us to 55 inch TV screens!

  • Hilarious to see the end of podcasting coming decidedly unbangily but with the whimperiest of whimpers as the 2007 bloggies cut the category for best podcast of a weblog. Remember when people podcasted? That was cool.
  • I still haven’t got the story right about the Space Invaders rip off images being shown in Boston as reported Thursday in this article:

    …yesterday, a subway worker less attuned to the latest in underground marketing techniques called the police after spotting one of the “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” cartoon characters on an overpass in Charlestown. The terrorism scare that followed touched off a massive response from police. When it was discovered that the electronic boards were only ads for a cartoon, serious condemnation flowed from Washington and Boston.

    What generation gap? Space Invaders was 28 years ago. Who in the work force who does not recognize this sort of character?

There. It is done. Soon there will be a week of February behind us, then it will be mid-month. Before long, we will meet March and this farce of a winter will be gone.

Nice And Quiet

What a pleasant week it has been without the refer logs leading me to the reviews of the whacked complaining of rudeness and telling lies about lying, with strangers making unwelcome accusations against each other of no interest to anyone. How nice to have the conviviality of sport and group work making for gentle days of peace. It is like the thought of the Russian gent to the left: “hmm – a hole, a line and hope of a fish.” There was a time when I stopped arguing elsewhere as arguing gained nothing: it was like shouting at a shoe that did not fit. It is nice to experience the same stopping here, moving on now between the group projects and the sports and whatever.

Maybe there is another level of bloggy understanding where ego leaves us and we know unknowing as it is? Be the link.

Friday Bullets For Shane

When I was seven, I had to go to the hospital in North Sydney. I had something but the doctors couldn’t figure out for a week they poked around me, one day taking so many blood tests that they ended up having to hold me down. They ended up figuring it out and I was out in about ten days.

Andrew from Bound By Gravity wrote me a few days ago about another seven year old boy who is in hospital in Ottawa with a tougher haul these days. He has Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. But that boy, Shane, has a request. He wants cards from around the world for his birthday. Here is Andrew’s explanation of what you can do to help Shane. I like how Brooksie puts it:

Yes, you do have time to do this. He’s a seven year-old child with leukemia sitting in isolation at a hospital right now. You’ll make the time.

Right?

You can make the time, too. He address to write to is here. Bullet points in a moment.

  • US College baseball season has begun.
  • Earlier this week I saw a blip pass by that for some reason did not get much attention. Canadian pension funds are doing very well.
     

Canadian pension funds moved into a healthier financial position last year, buoyed by strong stock market performance and higher bond yields, Mercer Investment Consulting reported Tuesday. The median return for Canadian pooled balanced pension funds was 13 per cent for the year, “benefiting from strong performance in most of the major equity markets in 2006,” Mercer said in reporting the results of its pooled fund survey.

Whenever there is a tough patch for pensions, people go one about how the sky is falling and turn, in despair, to libertarianism. Expect packed union halls and a spike in NDP polling for the next wee while.

  • A few weeks ago we discussed the meaning of local in our form of Federalism. It appears, however, that in the heartland of the individual, local does not actually mean the local community as the council of Fort MacMurray Alberta is looking for a stop to the expansion of the tar sands that are the windfall fueling the provincial boom and the local social bust. Here is the story for Jim Elve’s place. So is the best “local” really just the next big faceless bureaucracy below the national level?
  • Rob posts an very lucid article from the New York Times on the way food and health have been treated for the last number of decades.
  • Dick Cheney is getting a hard rap this week. Last night on CNN there was a little tag line on the screen which was something like “Cheney Deluded?” Now, if I was ever to have a bull headed crazy power freak in my like, Dick’s the man. Why? Well, he wrote Dad a letter one that hung on the cottage wall next to the one from Michael Palin for one thing. Maybe it is the Libby case where all of a sudden the defense is not backing up all those bloggers that claimed the charges were overkill. NPR has more on Dick the Contrarian, who even seethed at Wolf Blitzer this week – seethed!!
  • I think I would be more sympathetic if there was a concurrent promise to create a Maritimes Union with centralized services, two of which were not nepotism and patronage…did I say that out loud?

That must be it. If you want to check out some great blogging, pop over to the beer blog and read about Knut’s adventures at the world’s northernmost bar. Tough crowd that likes a mural of a shot polar bear.

How To Be A Journalist These Days

An interesting column by the BBC’s Bill Thompson but one which makes me wonder how the conversation got so skewed away from what really is to what is claimed to be. Thompson talks about what a journalism student today is to do given new media:

Unfortunately for those already working as journalists, many readers and viewers seem to feel the same way about the need for professional journalists. The rapid growth of citizen journalism seems less a sign of the emergence of a vibrant new area of online newsgathering and reporting than a symptom of the decline of existing forms of news journalism. It points to a career-threatening loss of trust in what people see on their TV screens or read in the daily papers as they become what citizen journalist advocate Dan Gillmor calls ‘the former audience’. This could be seen as a counsel of despair, but I do not think we should give up hope yet. If we are willing to look closely at what the internet is doing to the practice of journalism then we could do a lot to regain this trust and re-establish a connection with readers and viewers.

My problem, of course, is I have no evidence of there being anything called “citizen journalism.” We have the three news stories that have been affected by popular bloggism: Rather was fired, Howard Dean screamed and someone added 25% more smoke to a picture of a fire in Lebanon. Sure, we have cut and paste cranks of all sorts like me but that is only the new iWaterCooler and nothing more. The closest thing we have to a citizen journalist in Canada is Stephen Taylor’s excellent work at his blog but that, if we are honest, is just a branch of a political party however effective he is – hardly either “citizen” or “journalist.” Other than that? Zippo.

So where did this new era go? If we measure new by new things adding newness, what got gained? We have been happily distracted and convinced of something not well pinpointed. The entertainment value of self-publication and the putative accompanying glam has led ourselves to a more complex but more confused place where substantive analysis let alone criticism is oddly seen as being something only a traitor to the medium would engage in. Trouble is rumours now have it blogs will peak in 2007 which means they peaked in late 2005. Seeing as podcasting, YouTube and MySpace have also run their course by either commercializing, censoring or just looking too damn nerdy, the track record of the digital as dud is starting to show.

Given all that, what would I do if I were a journalism student? Start a newspaper or a radio station or maybe get that masters degree. The next thing is coming and you can’t afford to be be bothered with this old tech, lo-fi anyone-can-do-it stuff. I, for my part, am thrilled to perhaps have access to a summer of 2007 plot where I may be able to get 1000 onions and 50 lbs of storage seed potatoes in the ground.

Communal Boogie Curse Generating Post

It’s not that I hate the Indianapolis Colts like I dislike the Habs, Man U and the Yankees but there is something really appealing about someone being labeled as a top notch loser, the guys who can win, should win but just doesn’t win. Especially when he doesn’t win against the same guy. It’s like if Lemieux had Gretzky’s number from day one.

So, there are sixteen minutes to go and I am now sending messages back through the TV: collapse Colts…oogie-woogie-woogie…throw another interception Manning…oogie-woogie-woogie…

Excellent Satellite Smoking Action

I have to admit, I like China’s style. What other nation would spend a bazillion dollars to smash its own lo-fi satellite out of the sky with a lo-fi ICM with its steering wheel removed, aimed only up.

China’s apparent success in destroying one of its own orbiting satellites with a ballistic missile signals that its rising military intends to contest American supremacy in space, a realm many here consider increasingly crucial to national security. The test of an antisatellite weapon last week, which Beijing declined to confirm or deny Friday despite widespread news coverage and diplomatic inquiries, was perceived by East Asia experts as China’s most provocative military action since it testfired missiles off the coast of Taiwan more than a decade ago.

Provocative? It was gnarly. It’s like a bad guy from Wayne’s World‘s move or even something from a 1950’s Godzilla flick.

[Scene: Dusk. A board room with scientists in lab coats on one side of table with Chinese leaders on the other, all wearing Roy Orbison glasses.]

Lead Scientist: Comrad Chairman, we propose to launch the missile at dawn to smash satellite Golden Happy Tomorrow IV in an unprecedented display of revolutionary power creating a shower of bright burning meteorites that will show your wisdom to the globe!

Chairmen: [Finger tips touching before him, slowly forming a slight smile.] Excellent.

[Room erupts in cautious laughter that builds in a cautious crescendo. Camera pans to a map of world on the wall as laughter continues cautiously.]

Face it: every once in a while a tyranny has to do something stylish and, frankly, Gadafi has the clothes horse thing cornered.