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Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada "Of Interest To Me" May 16, 2004
Thursday, May 13, 2004
Following a lengthy cleanup in the wake of Hurricane Juan damage, Halifax's beloved Point Pleasant Park will be reopening on June 4th. I can't wait to see it; it is certainly going to be a different place. Maybe I'll change my mind when I see it, but I have a feeling that I won't be that sad; the Park will have changed and will be much more open, but it will at least mean more ocean view. The trails will still be there, and still lots of trees and the paths. I can image the wildlife took a beating in the storm, but hopefully that will come back, too.
Wired is also reporting that owners of hybrid cars are saying that the advertised gas mileage is significantly overestimated.
There are lots of good reasons to be buying hybrid cars these days, but saving money (or even spending the same money) doesn't appear to be one of them, and likely won't be for a few years. If you've bought one, The Campblog recommends that you commend yourself for your good environmental citizenship and quit griping. I would guess that the tests were accurate under some conditions.
One is surprised that "Don't Leave Radioactive Material in the back of a pickup truck on campus" wasn't already one of the University of Saskatchewan's guidelines, but we'll trust it is now.
In Wired, Francis Fukuyama reviews the new Jane Jacobs book, "Dark Age Ahead", concluding that "the long-term impact of her life's work is much greater than would be apparent to readers of the present volume." I've read Jacobs' "The Death and Life of Great American Cities", which Fukuyama requires his students to read, and "The Nature of Economies". Her "The Economy of Cities" is on my shelf to be read.
Doomsayers usually underestimate the self-corrective feedback loops built into modern social systems. But the September 11 attacks suggest that our society may be hoist on its own technological petard, vulnerable to the very machines we are so adept at making.
In Dark Age Ahead, Jacobs worries over crises in five areas: the collapse of the family and its communities, the tendency of higher educational institutions to credential rather than educate, the prostitution of science, conservative tax-cutting that starves local governments, and the failure of professions (especially accounting) to police themselves.
Though they may be valid concerns, as Fukuyama points out, Jacobs has spent years making the point about the self-correcting aspects of economies and markets; how an economy is very much like an ecological system. If we stay true to our liberal heritage in the West, we'll make it though.
Help! I've been abducted by the "neocon cult of Churchill"!!
Someone called Michael Lind who is something called the Whitehead Senior Fellow at something called the New America Foundation, wrote a lame, vicious piece in 'The Spectator' claiming that Bush and the neocons hold Churchill as a hero, but they shouldn't, and then that they should, or something.
The Churchill Centre responds, saying that Lind's article "contains much that is trite and much that is true, as Arthur Balfour once said of a speech by Churchill: The problem is that what's true is trite, and what's not trite is not true." The issue of what Churchill's voting record would have been is certainly questionable/debatable, but it makes the point regarding Lind's knowledge of the subject of his article.
Saturday, May 8, 2004
Now, I think Stevie Y is just simply one of the all-time greats. When he first hoisted the Stanley Cup over his head a few years ago, it was one of the great moments in NHL history. He seems like a cool guy and I'm very happy to see that he'll be back. But it's too bad that it took such a serious injury to get him to say that players should be wearing visors. It's so obvious. I'm surprised the league doesn't force it for insurance/legal liability reasons anyway.
Hockey players should also be fined severely for saying that they "really didn't mean to hurt" the other guy when they sucker punch them from behind or wildly swing a stick at the other guy's head. Yes, they should also be fined and penalized for the incident, but they should also be smacked around for saying that they did these things without meaning to hurt their opponent.
You Little Cracker. No one is as exuberant about anything as David Dickinson is about antiques, auctions and finding bargains. I love BBC's "Bargain Hunt". Even though we get episodes that are a few years old, Lori and I even enjoy watching the reruns.
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For those of you who don't get BBC, teams of two (related by family or friendship) are given 200 quid and one hour to go through an antique fair and buy items that they think will do well at auction. A week later, the items they've bought are placed in an auction and they find out what kind of profit or loss they've made. More often than not, they lose money; it's tougher than you'd think. The appeal of the show for me is really looking at the items that are featured and getting info from the show's experts, including David D., regarding the history of items' manufacture and use. We're actually not auction-goers, but there are a lot of useful tips in this show that could come in handy. What if you come across a piece of Clarice Cliff pottery, or John Ditchfield glass, or good old piece of Tunbridge ware. Of course, most people buy things because they like the look of them ~ if you're buying china that's just going on display, you don't care that much if it has a wee crack in it; whereas the crack does you harm if you're going to try to resell it. |
Perhaps it's just my age showing, but I like this kind of stuff. The production costs for a show like this are relatively miniscule; just shows you don't need lots of production money to make a good television show -- just a good idea, an interesting subject, and a little exuberance.
What a bobby dazzler.
As sort of a tie-in, we've also been enjoying the reruns of "Lovejoy" that have been playing on BBC Canada. I generally ignored Lovejoy it's first few times through on North American television (didn't A&E advertise it as "Lovejoy Mysteries"?), but I really got into it over the last few years. I'm pretty sure we've seen them all by now. While the characters are likeable and the 'mysteries' are interesting, the stars of the show are really the antique items or themes of that particular episode. It's interesting to learn about the care, creativity and craftsmanship that went into a certain type of furniture, or a certain Bible printing, or a certain artist's work. There's also interesting stuff on the different scams that take place in the art and antique world. [Ian McShane is doing a great job and no doubt having lots of fun as the smart, tough, foul-mouthed and very successful saloon owner Al Swearengen on HBO's "Deadwood" -- except for the foul mouth, seems like a logical jump from Lovejoy to Swearengen.]
Like "Bargain Hunt", the show takes place in various settings throughout the UK, and you get a feel for the different locales and the arts and crafts production that's been at the heart of these local economies for generations.
I grew up near Oxford School in Halifax. A big square brick building in the center of the peninsula, with a large paved schoolyard. When you walk or drive by, there are always kids on the basketball court or another part of the yard playing ground hockey (it's not "road hockey", it's "ground hockey"). It was always the same gang that was there playing away.
This week I drove by and saw something that I'd never seen there before -- kids playing lacrosse, complete with helmets and masks.
Shows the impact that the success that professional lacrosse has had in recent years. I've never played it, but it would be nice to see Canada's national sport being played a bit more. There are actually lacrosse scholarships at some U.S. schools; wild.
Pat Tillman was a hero; he didn't "die for nothing" as Ted Rall claims.
He died trying to rid the world of men who would make this story impossible, men that would find utterly abhorrent the kind of fun, liberal education and entertainment afforded Afghan children, particularly girls, by this television production. The men who'd take their religious fascism into every one of our homes if they could.
The famous puppets of “Sesame Street” will help Afghanistan’s children overcome their country’s traumatic past, starring in videos to be shown in schools recovering from Taliban rule and decades of war.
The first of 400 education kits, with specially adapted programs featuring Big Bird and other characters, have been given to Afghan authorities, officials said.
“We need our children to have their eyes and their minds opened to new ideas,” said Sekander Giyam, an adviser to the Afghan minister of education.
The kits also will help Afghan teachers “move into a new century of education,” Giyam said in a statement released late Thursday.
Each kit contains 10 20-minute episodes made from material developed for Alam Simsim, an Egyptian adaptation of Sesame Street funded by the U.S. government.
For Afghanistan, the program has been dubbed in Dari, one of the country’s two main languages, and renamed “Koche Sesame.”
Btw, Wake up America, you poor Yanks have no idea of the situation you're in! Rall also says,
people don’t like to think they’re living in a country that’s led by an evil, dictatorial madman. But they are, they are living in Nazi Germany, in Stalinist Russia. Russians and Germans at the time were no different than us, they were patriotic but a little dismayed and worried about the lunatics who were running their country.
For ten measly U.S. dollars you can get yourself all set up for quick and easy blog reading; I did. Did James Lileks take the week off but you keep visiting his site to see what's new? Don't bother, just let BlogMatrix Jäger do all the work. As Dave would say, go download Jäger! Now!
Sunday, May 2, 2004
In the prehistoric television department, someone has a prehistoric grudge against early 70s Canadian sit'com', "The Trouble with Tracy".
It sucked from day one. It was bilge-water in a rusty bucket. They had to spray the tapes with industrial strength air freshener because this show stunk so much. The "jokes" were unoriginal, unfunny and poorly delivered. The acting was pathetically wooden. The sets were cardboard, at best. Entire walls wobbled when doors were opened. They had no "blooper reel" for Ed McMahon and Dick Clark, because they left the bloopers in. The single, re-usable laugh track was recorded at Knowlton Nash’s Muskoka cottage barbecue one rainy summer. Pure crap from start to finish.
The show, which I barely barely remember, was apparently being remade about a year ago -- has this gone anywhere?? Are things so bad that we have to remake dullish stuff like this? Is this really a "cult classic"? (Quick, someone alert the BBC.) Canadians didn't have much choice in the early 70s; "cable" access to the big 3 American networks wasn't there, at least not for my family. It was CBC English, CBC French and CTV/ATV. That was it. Does this stuff really need to be reinterpreted?? Shows like "The Beachcombers" and "King of Kensington", and even shows like "Adventures in Rainbow Country" and "Forest Rangers", were good, even great, in their own right, they were what they were, or whatever I'm trying to say, but let's just leave them in peace and watch the reruns.
Later: an astute Flea reader (all Flea readers are astute) points out that this was a set-up for an April Fool's joke from last year. I missed that one; there must have been a war on or something. Oh well, my post was more about old Canadian tv shows than the remake per se. Still, there should be a moratorium on Canadian sitcom remakes, no joke about that.
Wet Kentucky Derby
I guess his mudder was a mudder.
Surprised that a horse called Action This Day didn't win at Churchill Downs. !!!!
2003, bad year for freedom of the press
Freedom House reports that freedom of the press took a hit last year. In a report released April 28, 2004, Freedom of the Press: A Global Survey of Media Independence, 192 countries and 1 territory were reviewed. In all, press freedoms declined in these ten countries: Bolivia, Bulgaria, Cape Verde, Gabon, Guatemala, Guinea-Bissau, Italy, Moldova, Morocco, and the Philippines.
Legal harassment, political pressure, and violence by state and non-state actors against journalists combined to worsen conditions in many countries, resulting in the second consecutive year of a global decline in freedom for news media.... some of the most serious setbacks took place in countries where democracy is backsliding, such as in Bolivia and Russia, and in older, established democracies, most notably Italy.
I believe Russia was already in the bad books, thus it doesn't appear on the list of 10 countries where press freedoms slid. No surprise about Russia, but let's make note of countries like Italy, the Philippines, Bulgaria and Bolivia.
You'd think the West's Big Media would harp on this stuff for a while. [Later: the next day, the Globe and Post both did, to a degree; didn't notice any US media on it though]
On the good side, Kenya and Sierra Leone have moved up in rankings, going from Not Free to Partly Free. Iraq saw the most drastic increase in press freedoms, yet it still remains in the Not Free category.
With the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime in April, hundreds of new publications are covering a wide range of opinions. Iraqis were able to gain unfettered access to the Internet and to uncensored foreign television broadcasts. Nevertheless, a continuing lack of security, the murders of at least 13 journalists, and an ambiguous legal and regulatory media framework kept Iraq in the ranks of the Not Free countries despite its impressive numerical gains, as noted in the survey’s rating system.
Worldwide, only 17 percent of the world's population live in countries that have free media, 40 percent live in Partly Free media conditions (with some restrictions on media freedoms), and 43 percent are in Not Free situations with state control or other obstacles.
The worst of the worst are Burma, Cuba, Libya, North Korea and Turkmenistan.
The naming of cats is a difficult matter
The naming of cats is indeed a difficult matter. We saw "Cats" at Neptune on Friday night, it was great fun. They put on a wonderful production. While I've never seen the show elsewhere, I doubt that the Neptune production was lacking in anything. We had a wonderful blast of warm weather on Friday, it was a lovely 26C, and we had dinner at everyone's favourite Greek taverna, Opa!
While practical, I wonder if this will really mean anything. "Pushes UN to the sidelines"? How? If it's just an expansion of the G7/G8 meetings, which are more or less economic/trade chats, then fine.
Why would France, China, or Russia give up a permanent veto on the UN Security Council to play up some G20 scheme? Can't see it happening or meaning much.
Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States, European Union
The EU? The article points out that Paul Martin hadn't been promoting the UN just prior to his Washington visit, but why would you do that just before going to Washington. (I can think of another guy who probably would have.)
As for the international reaction force to intervene in times of crisis, I think it's a good idea. Workable, in terms of an established international organization? Who knows, but there has been an ad hoc organization over the past two-and-a-half years where it mattered. Chretien proposed the same thing last year, I believe, and I liked it then, too. Very very difficult to propose this kind of organization and argue how it did not apply to Iraq, though.
The hundreds of thousands of bodies aren't always flowing down rivers; sometimes they're buried in unmarked mass graves.