Category: Uncategorized

Is Clemens A Bust?

Watching the Yankees die a thousand deaths this year has all the delicious splendor of that day and year and decade when the Montreal Canadians watched Patrick Roy let in nine goals, tell the owner, GM and coach behind the bench that he was never playing for the loser club again and get traded to Colorado where he went on to confirm himself as the greatest goalie of all time. Of Roger’s outing last night against the lowly Orioles, the NYT’s story this morning begins:

It feels like falling off a cliff, Joe Torre said Wednesday night after another loss, and the metaphor is appropriate. The Yankees had reached a high point before this trip, but suddenly they are plunging to depths never experienced in Torre’s 12 years as manager.

Nice to see that it was eastern Ontarian Erik Bedard for Baltimore who shut down the opposition. Clemens, on the other hand, is now 1-3 with a 5.42 E.R.A. in his four starts.

Why do I care? Is it always good to relish the failures of the great? Wouldn’t the world be a better place of Clemens wages originally estimated at around a million bucks a win (now estimated at five) had gone to a worthy cause…like minor league player development? Is there any hope for my prayers to be answered and the final AL East standings ending up Boston, Baltimore, Tampa, Toronto, New York?

Extremism

Of all the “-isms”, extremism is the best. Mainly because it means nothing but also because in the 1990’s…or was it due, like so much, to Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure that extreme became a positive. Anyway, Nixon was against it and had the CIA rooting it out in Canada in the 1970s right about when they were working with the mafia on stuff. Apparently the mafia is not extreme.

Ottawa was one of at least 10 foreign cities targeted by the CIA in a clandestine operation in which the agency tried to ferret out those who were fostering U.S. “extremism” in the early 1970s. The program, codenamed MHCHAOS, was described by the U.S. spy agency in documents it released yesterday, chronicling misdeeds ranging from assassination plots and domestic and foreign spying to surveillance of journalists.

I thought it was “Mu-chachos” when I first read it in my uncoffee-ed state which would only make it more excellent although the “chaos” thing is all master of disasters, so maybe it is a pretty good code word.

I wish I had the job of writing the code words for stuff. I would have saved a special place for “Operation Excellent”.

Snooty Facebook

Seeing as I never did anything with MySpace (or Twitter, or Orkut, or Friendster….) I wonder if the fact that Facebook works for me and my undergrad pals says something about us:

The research suggests those using Facebook come from wealthier homes and are more likely to attend college. By contrast, MySpace users tend to get a job after finishing high school rather than continue their education.

What to make of that? I don’t know why there is so much buy-in from the people I know but it is as accessible as email in many ways keeping the participation threshold down. The lack of skins or visual personalization works in its favour as well. But the communal scrapbook thing is what I think works very well. Obsessing over who is that person in a photo from 23 years ago and tagging the separate people within them creates a pattern of continuity that expresses your own time line as well as branches out to do the same for people you know. So the illusion of a community gets some backing up compared to the post and reply of blogs or the thoughts of the day. It is a different thing to claim, having an actual mutual past – as opposed to a supposed present interest.

A Second Career In The Military

An interesting article in The Globe this morning on the recruitment of older folk, in large part established professionals, for the Canadian military:

“In the last two years, our strategic intake plan has been heavily dominated by the combat arms,” says Captain Holly-Ann Brown, a spokeswoman for Canadian Forces Recruiting. “Are there people over 25 applying for combat arms? Sure. But, typically, the person coming to the military looking for a career in combat tends to be out of high school.” As a result, the average age fell to about 24 last year – still closer to 30 than the minimum entry age of 17 for full-time service. Older service men and women can be costly in terms of benefits, and there is also the dicey issue of whether they can hold their own with the young and spry. Yet military data indicate that nearly one-quarter of the 2,596 troops currently serving in Afghanistan are older than 40. More than a third are younger than 29.

That is quite the thing. I thought when I heard of Trevor Greene‘s decision to serve and subsequent injuries that his enlistment was maybe a rare thing. But recently learning of another Kingsman of my era, Stephen Murray, being out there building roads and other good things in the reconstruction team gave me some inkling that there were more than you might assume.

Group Project: NuGovernment Status Update

I am a bit at a loss at the political plan – you know, the plan to get re-elected. If making everyone unhappy is the road to electoral success, it seems the Not Pre-existing Government is doing a great job:

The receding tide of electoral support for MacKay defies most of the rules of politics. High-profile cabinet ministers aren’t supposed to be in trouble, particularly when they represent poor rural areas. MacKay is not only foreign affairs minister, he controls millions of dollars in local business grants as minister of the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency. He is well-liked and holds what was once the safest Tory seat in the country, a seat held for 22 years by his father, Elmer.

The prospect of someone other than a Tory getting in in Pictou County is frankly stunning but the cavalier attitude that goes along with the loss and other likely losses in Atlantic Canada does not seem to be linked to the picking up of seats elsewhere. The green agenda has weakened the resolve and maybe even the interest of many of the faithful. The uncompromising tone belies many last minutes back-tracks.

Aside from the personal affiliations that might make me less than interested in seeing Harper succeed, does anyone else think it is strange at how little he has done to establish his own agenda? To actually get more seats the next time? Or has he done very well with the cards dealt? Group Project rules apply – do not snipe at him – and is there any other pronoun for this government other than “him”? – but think about opportunities or challenges that might have been dealt with differently by another person in the same office.

Bees News

Bees are your most ignored life partner. I heard recently that if bees were to disappear, we’d have about four years to find an alternative or humans would die off.

Last night, right at the deepest part of dusk, I saw an extraordinary thing as I was watching a sugar maple as I listened to the Yankees lose in 13 innings on the radio through the rolled down car window. It was swarmed by honey bees. But it was not in flower. This being June, the whole of the green world is packed with sweetness and the air was full of it last evening. I think the bees thought the whole tree was a flower and they were looking for the mother lode of nectar that must have been there. The were not swarming in a pack but spaced out, one to each leaf or two, animating the entire tree.

Chat. Friday. Bullets. Go!

An interesting week. The Red Sox have gotten back in gear and gotten back into the groove as the Yankees again falter. Summer is now here which means it will be a bit colder this weekend compared to last. Gary reports a tornado yesterday from the cold front that gave us hail up here. That was the sports and weather. Here is the news:

  • Neato Update: Excellent. Excellent. Excellent:

    Your order #202-6921784-XXXXXX (received 18-February-2007)

    Amazon.co.uk items (Sold by Amazon EU S.a.r.L.):

    1 Pub Games of England (Olea…) £11.94 1 £11.94

    Shipped via International Mail (estimated arrival date: 29-June-2007)…

    Excellent. Did I mention this is excellent?

  • Update: Good thing they gave him a ticket.
  • Update: I have officially coined “Royal Sombrero” and, implicitly, the intense version “Sombrero Royale”. Alert the media.
  • Chris, Darcey, and the Flea all note the most offensive and apparently acceptable thing I have ever seen in a Canadian newspaper.
  • NCPR’s Brian Mann won an Edward R. Murrow award this week for his report on a rugby tournament in the Adirondacks.
  • My good pal the Pope announced his rules of the road earlier this week. I think this is a good thing. If the Conservative party is going to co-opt NASCAR, the Vatican was wise to grab the branding of the drive home. But I am sure he ripped this one off from me, something of a personal motto: “courtesy, uprightness and prudence will help you deal with unforeseen events.”
  • Remember when cable TV was in its teens and the new channels got notice? One, the History channel, quickly was dubbed “the war channel” as it was odd to see old battle footage documentaries all the time. The other night, I was watching one about WWI and followed up with some surfing and came across this extraordinary contemporary report on the fall of Brussels in 1914.
  • I find these addiction to email stats interesting. I can’t say I am addicted to email because it’s died back a bit compared to a few years ago as a tool for me. A bit over the top to write: “[h]alf of Britons could not exist without e-mail…” Also noteworthy is the observation that Facebook is establishing itself as MySpace for adults.
  • The forces of anti-Canadian flag waving in Los Angeles have backed down. I suppose there being so few Canadians in the area, the Dodgers didn’t know what they were looking at when they saw the Maple Lead flapping up there in the bleachers.
  • Having only lived in Canadian military towns for most of my life – without being a military kid (except for that Berlin airlift bit in the RAF) – it was odd to see the brief flap in Toronto over the yellow ribbon thingies on the Big Smoke’s emergency vehicles. In the end the right thing was done which is good as I support supporting. Russon’s a bit surprised that the Star supports supporting those supporting us.

Well, that is it for now. Not an earth shattering week but we are again the house of many mouths and that sort of keeps things local. Wizards tonight as well as maybe Steve and Barry’s.

Thankfully, An End Of Something

A bit quietly, something ended the other day when Lessig packed it in, leaving the unproblem of intellectual property and digital media behind. Having beaten the drum and been a leader of the idea that copyright should not apply to expressions, much to the disgust of the creators of ideas who own and make money off of those expressions, we now find ourselves in a world where the proprietary interest has won out. The “mash-up” world of 2004 that Boingsters would have had us believe in never was just as the world of groceries bought via the internet promised in 1998 disappeared.

This is a wise decision as, in one way, nothing much as really changed from the effort while in another the world has largely moved on. Simon of Living in Dryden illustrates it all very neatly in this passage from a recent post:

About ten years ago, I went to a conference on web development. Everyone was talking about ‘disintermediation’ and how “brick and mortar stores” would get crushed. Consumers would be able to go straight to the manufacturer’s web site, or to a shopping web site of some kind, and order their products directly. All of the supply chains and middlemen (intermediaries) were going to vanish, leaving only producers of goods and their warehousing and delivery. Or something like that. That hasn’t really happened, except in a few categories of items where the Web turned out to be especially effective. Computer geeks, maybe because they heard this story enough times, often buy computer products online. It’s easy for an online bookstore to maintain the tremendous inventory some book buyers dream of, and for some reason a lot of people seem to like making travel reservations online. Even when it sort of works, though, this “disintermediation” is kind of perverse, sending goods all over the place from all over the place. Large online sellers, like Amazon, end up with hugely complicated supply chain management systems and warehouses all over to manage this process. Importers, wholesalers, and web site managers still act as ‘intermediaries’. Is it really that much less mediated than going to a store?

In January 2005 when Lessig was a bit more of a popular ideas man, I listened to him interviewed on NPR’s The Connection and took down some notes on the vision. He believed that under copyright the rules for content in text differed from that in film and music and image. The “next generation of blogs,” he said, will mix to create more powerful social commentary. Never.

That’s because plenty hasn’t really happened. News media have taken on a form of inter-connection with consumers but the balance has not really altered. Blogs have not advanced beyond scrapbooks and on-line journals but also things like YouTube, MySpace and Facebook have made it easy to participate in on-line experience without adding much substantive content and certainly without any real collaboration. And no one is surprised now when deals are made to ensure rights holders interests are respects and thereby, rather than being an obstacle, used as a platform for further development. These things are good. There has been no disruptive revolution, no need to fire millions of grocery store clerks, truckers and shippers or artists. Subscriptions to local newspapers are up. There has been change and the good from digital media have enhanced what was. But no revolution.

Like most with strong firmly-held beliefs, Lessig worked hard, thought a lot of good thoughts but missed the point…as, to be fair, a lot of people did. Alarmingly, however, he now wants to rid us all of “corruption” which he seems to define this way:

In one of the handful of opportunities I had to watch Gore deliver his global warming Keynote, I recognized a link in the problem that he was describing and the work that I have been doing during this past decade. After talking about the basic inability of our political system to reckon the truth about global warming, Gore observed that this was really just part of a much bigger problem. That the real problem here was (what I will call a “corruption” of) the political process. That our government can’t understand basic facts when strong interests have an interest in its misunderstanding.

That form of corruption appears to be an effort to stomp out disagreeing with Lessig. Here we go again. Good luck on that one.