Isn't that what a photo op is for?

Prime Minister Stephen Harper puts on triple the usual security, to prevent media from covering a photo opportunity? Of kids with cancer giving him daffodils? Sponsored by the Canadian Cancer Society?

I can see why he would want to maintain total secrecy on that one.

Question for Mr. Harper: Define photo opportunity.

Beware the robotic moose

It may not look real from up-close, but obviously it's good enough to fool poachers, who've been shooting at a robotic decoy moose in Nova Scotia -- then finding themselves arrested.

Having it both ways

First, this guy sells himself to a bunch of crappy classic rock radio stations. But then he tries to redeem things by making his own anti-ads. In effect, culture jamming himself. Does this negate the fact that he still did the ads for the crappy stations?

aka Matthew Miller

Now this is pretty odd (make sure to click at least one of the videos). But why not? If you can have Christian metal, why not Lubavitch hip-hop/reggae?

Five years?

The largest nursing home in the Halifax area is hiring a nurse practitioner. The normally meek Don Connolly, host of the local CBC Radio One morning show, sounded baffled when he interviewed the home's medical director, and wondered why such an obvious solution to the problem of lack of medical staff hadn't been put in place sooner.

The guest explained that they had been working on this project for "four or five years", with grant money to set up a research project that would allow for evidence-based research proving a nurse practitioner would be helpful.

Well, duh. You've got 434 residents, served by 3 family doctors. You don't need a research protocol to know that it might be handy to have someone on staff who can do some diagnosing, prescribe drugs and order tests.

Stephen Kimber and official truth

Rabble reprints an excellent Stephen Kimber column from the Halifax Daily News. Kimber writes about Trevor Greene (who, I believe, is a former student of his), the Canadian soldier injured in an axe attack in Afghanistan, and the shooting of an innocent man by a Canadian soldier in Kandahar City.

In his usual cool-headed way, Kimber tries to get more of the story, to raise questions about the official version. He doesn't know exactly what happened, but the point is that there are many different ways to look at the same events, and the Canadian military does nobody a service by quickly coming up with an official version of the truth and sticking to it.

Kimber should meet up with the talk-show caller I heard yesterday, who claimed to have been a member of the military, and whose perspective was that nobody ought to be discussing what happened unless they were actually there. Huh?

Mark Crispin Miller is Sexy and Naked?

There I am at the Huffington Post, the prog blog / website run by Republican turned Republican-hater Arianna Huffington. Huffington runs a neat little thing called the Contagious Festival, where you can post funny, political flash bits. The more people watch and forward your post, the higher it rises in the rankings. Once a month, a panel of judges (including Huffington, John Cusack and the Yes Men) looks at the ones at and near the top of the list and chooses a winner.

If I'm not careful, I could spend all day clicking these things. Instead, I choose one. It's called "Sexy Naked Lady." I click knowing that I'm not going to get a sexy naked lady. I don't want to be taken to a sexy naked lady. I realize it's a come-on.

Nevertheless, I am mightily pissed off by the end of the Contagious item (which, by the way, is consistently near the top of the list). Why? Because it is an old-fashioned hard-sell (think car dealer ads) piece hectoring me and others to get Mark Crispin Miller's book Fooled Again, which argues that W and his pals stole the 2004 election, and that they will keep getting away with it in the coming elections too, if nothing is done to stop them.

The ad -- what else could you call it? -- has just about everything I hate about a lot of American activist discourse (on both sides): the shouting, the us vs. them all-or-nothing tone, the absolute conviction that WE ARE BEING SHUT OUT. The ad says the book hasn't had a single review in a national publication. Well, Farhad Manjoo gave it a lot of ink (er, whatever) in Salon. But Manjoo calls it a "vacuous, tendentious collections of pseudo-journalism", which, I guess, discounts Salon from being a national publication. Manjoo must be working for The Man. Of course, Miller also got to write a major feature ("None Dare Call it Stolen") in Harper's, but that doesn't count either, because it's not a review.

Maybe it's a great book, I don't know. Maybe Bush and his cronies stole the election. I wouldn't put it past them. What gets me here is being shouted at, and being urged to market a book as if it were a profound civic duty. You know, even an attempt at a bit of humour or some graphics (other than screaming headline-style text) would have made a difference.

But what do I know? Maybe it will win this month's Contagious.