Category: Uncategorized

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.

Kim Freaks

You know he would double dip the chips if you invited Kim Il-sung over. Nick the trinkets and baubles from your bookcase when you weren’t looking, too. Look in the medicine cabinet. Why? Be cause we are all apparently at war with him so he don’t care no more.

Satellite images indicate North Korea appears to be getting ready for a second nuclear test, officials said yesterday, as the defiant Communist regime held huge rallies and proclaimed that UN sanctions amount to a declaration of war.

I say that someone – maybe Belgium – be given the task of storming the palace but do it in a really surreal way to match the nuttiness. Solders dressed up as sad clowns or velvet Elvi. Maybe after a global laugh and point.

Week Seven With Brendan Carney

It was going so well at about nine minutes into the game. I had just secured a source of Unibroue’s Maudite that I can keep to myself and, like many of you, was heading into Loblaws with the hope of finding a morsel of whisky cheddar when I heard on the radio that Syracuse was up 7-0. Later they were only down 17-14.

But soon that was pretty much that. Soon the Orange had lost on the road to West Virginia 41-17. I search for meaning in these times. Apparently Carney is “suffering through his worst statistical season and there hasn’t been anything out of kickoff or punt returns – except no turnovers.” There was maybe a wobbled hold on a field goal, too. Being on the wrong side of your QB getting sacked five times is not going to help either. Yet it was a big game for Carney in the bigger picture:

Senior Brendan Carney became SU’s career punting yardage leader against the Mountaineers. He kicked seven times for 275 yards at West Virginia and now has 10,256 career punting yards, breaking the old mark of 10,073 held by Mike Shafer.

Here are this week’s stats:

Kickoffs
No.
Yds
TB
OB
Avg
CARNEY,Brendan
4
255
1
0
63.8

Punting
No.
Yds
Ave
Long
In 20
TB
CARNEY,Brendan
7
275
39.3
45
1
2

I hadn’t realized when I picked this way of following Syracuse football that Carney was such a BMOC. Actually I had figured the lot of a punter who does not get to kick field goals would be one in the shadows. Interesting to note that we may (theoretically) see the Orange for the first Bowl in 70 years outside of the USA as the Big East is tagged to send a representative to the first International Bowl. But that would mean winning some more games. And the next two at least against Louisville and Cincinnati do not look like likely candidates. Actually all five remaining games look tough.

More on the game here. More Carney here.

Best Time

We live in cycles even as modernity trys to drive them out. With the fall comes the quietening of the FM band so that weak but neighbouring NPR comes in clearly without the irritation of co-channel soft rock stations from Ottawa. With each week comes the end of the week and the end of work if only for a time. In the day there are the three parts of plot: the beginning, middle and end. Some points in these cycles of cyles seem exceedingly good and just like I notice – since the digital clock became common when I was exactly nine – when it is 12:34 pm more than most times, I notice how good 8:21 am on a Saturday is when there isn’t much planned. Cheese toasts!

Ummm…What Was It I Was Going To Do…

Oh yea, watch the Mets. Go bullpen! Woot, let’s see the bullpen in the fourth! After, get the real news from the game at Deadspin. Like the news Alec Baldwin is an utter loser.

I got my hat like Willie’s but I want Tom’s hat, too. And what is that pitch Tom is pitching? You know I’d drop that one on the wind-up.

Warning: Business Writer Having Fun

I have never embraced the idea that one should not say anything if you have nothing nice to say. This is the ethic of the charlatan and the git. This is not to say that one should not use good manners as problems are honestly surveyed. Yet one has to admire the particular gusto with which this Toronto Star writer takes on the tale of the ending of corporate thingie BCE announced yesterday:

…The die may have been cast in the gradual decline of a great company on April 28, 1983, when Ma Bell was reinvented as BCE by then-Bell CEO Albert Jean de Grandpré. Bored by the regulated phone business, the trained lawyer and erstwhile classmate of Pierre Trudeau at Montreal’s Jean de Brebeuf College refocused one of North America’s most consistently well-run phone utilities away from its core business. His almost comically maladroit diversification campaign took Bell into natural gas pipelines, a trust company, women’s magazine publishing, banknote and other commercial printing, office towers and shopping centres in Canada and the United States and far-flung cable operations in the United States and Britain.

De Grandpré’s successors were left with the unenviable task of unloading that grab-bag of troubled assets at an enormous loss. But Jean Monty, CEO in the 1990s, was the equal to de Grandpré as an ambitious and ill-starred empire builder, snapping up fibre-optic giant Teleglobe Inc., CTV Inc. and The Globe and Mail, and leaving it to Sabia to endure huge writeoffs on Teleglobe, Bell Canada International Inc. and other chronic red-ink generators.

Feckless diversification takes its toll in two ways…

I think that is what someone having fun looks like.

Oh No! Not Torynomics!

I had hope that we had seen the last of the habitual bad math but this report does little to give comfort:

Ottawa itself could lose as much as $218-million in annual hotel tax revenue alone, he said…”Talk about shooting yourself in the foot,” Mr. Pollard said. The value of international tour groups and conventions in hotels was $1.28-billion last year, he said. Canada’s convention business as a whole is worth more than $2-billion a year, another industry official said. The government cancelled the Goods and Services Tax rebate program late last month. It said the move would save $78.8-million and that less than 3 per cent of foreign visitors applied for the rebates anyway. But Mr. Pollard believes the government didn’t include conferences and group travel in its calculations because convention planners get the GST rebates up front, not after the fact.

These number may not pan out as the actuals – do they ever – but as the looming bubble burst approaches doing things to make bits of the economy less competitive is an odd approach for a traditionally pro-business party. The whole tax policy thing is odd when you think about it: increasing income tax, the big-talk do-little GST shift, the uncertainty about moving around tax credits between levels of government, the beer and popcorn money tht makes my kids pay for your kids and now this.

It raises the more interesting and non-partisan question of “why is tax hard?” One likely reason is that it is used as a mechanism for other social and economic policy. It is a tool. If the policy is not well scoped out, perhaps difficulties will show in the tax side of the matter. But what policy goal is achieved by adding $78.8-million to the cost of international business and travel into Canada?