Category: Uncategorized

Star Gazing Canadian Style

brettbAfter last week’s Jane Pitfield debacle where I had a nice talk with the possible future Mayor of Toronto I vowed never to let it happen again. For folk not of the Great White North, this is the new Red Green, Brent Butt of Corner Gas.

The scene. I was at the corner of King and Young, exactly kitty corner from “the Pitfield event.” I approach the corner and see the moment opening up before me in an instant. I stood beside him waiting at the cross walk – like him looking forward – and said “Are you who I think you are?” He says “That depends, who do you think I am?” I say “the guy my wife is in love with.” He says “now that could go a number of ways…” Once I told him I wrote a blog he asked me if I knew The Flea and if he could wave to him in a picture. I obliged.

As nice a gent over the course of a 27 second conversation as ever there was or one very well versed in dealing with whackos.

Zip There And Back

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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When Will The Chaos End?

As the cause of fun advances with the further creeping domination by that thing that is the robot with a billion keyboards, let us not forget that there are victims along the way, good people working hard and getting crushed:

A firm selling machinery to make tubes and pipes has sued internet sensation YouTube – saying the video-sharing site causes havoc at its own business. Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment said its own website – Utube.com – had to be moved five times after millions of inadvertent hits made it crash.

And they told us the internet would be like one big library for all. What world have I woken up to today?

US Political Blogging?

Is it fair to suggest that this US political season, where Michael J Fox can sum it up by saying he needs neither the pity or permission of Rush Limbaugh, is a dead zone as far as the blogging goes? Is it truly the case that is is no bombast left in the bloat?

Remember in 2004 when this was the medium that would change everything? What changed?

Big East Basketball

In my never ending drive to mix insipid views of world affairs with solid reporting of what I get to see on my TV set, it is a particularly big day – even if the sun is not up yet as I am likely late for work – when there is a report in the NYT on Big East basketball. I do not follow the NBA. I do not care a whit for it. But I really like NCAA college b’ball, which is not to be unexpected from someone who was 6 foot 2 at 12. I knew the ways of the orange ball once, let me tell you. Then I stopped but that is another matter. The other, more specific Orange, is ranked third going in:

Coming in third in the coaches’ poll, Syracuse may need a big season from the freshman Paul Harris, who was named preseason rookie of the year. He will be called upon to provide some of the offense lost with the graduation of Gerry McNamara.

I don’t know if the games will be on the local northern NY radio but I will check that out soon. There…I just did. It states we should tune to 103.1 but I am thinking that 100.7 FM actually has the SU broadcast deal for Watertown.

Speaking Of Campaigns

Speaking of political campaigns, a subject most facinating, what we are witnessing to our south is even more interesting than questions Iggeriffic. Consider this:

As this country’s most outspoken and polarizing social conservative, the two-term Pennsylvania Republican senator has been in Democrats’ cross-hairs for two years. Now they’re moving in for the kill.

Recently when chatting with a northern New Yorker mention was made that this year might well be the end of the thirty years of a particular brand of conservatism that began – people will shake their heads now in disbelief – with the rise of Jimmy Carter in 1976, when the words “born again” entered the political arena with legitimacy for the first time. It has been that long since I would have imagined conservatism as a general thing being able to be described as “on the run” as the quote above does. It has been a long time since the moral majority might not have enough votes. To be fair, these things certainly have natural cycles as no theme captures the public imagination forever, but that is perhaps especially the case after corporate and public scandal, after it becomes apparent that debt financing is all that actually gets trickled down.

But, as in most things, there is a penchant to count one’s chickens before they are hatched. Needless to say I will be a gawking at the TV tube come election night. I’d have another US election pool but Kateland and I began our falling out over the last one, something I could not bear to repeat. But maybe I should. Maybe it is time. The Vote Master, after all, is back.

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.