What will Jay Currie complain about now?

Follow up to this post on The Current's panel the other day. Three Tories to discuss federal-provincial relations? Are the CBC folks that scared of being nailed for bias by the Conservative government?

...except it's not a lush planet

Dubai is Kashyyyk?

A little extra something with your fill-up

Something racy going on at the local Irving gas station. New sign reads

HOT BEV
& MUFFIN $2.49

Got to get in there and meet Hot Bev!

The Current's Tory Panel

Unintentionally entertaining discussion this morning on CBC Radio's The Current. The topic: fallings out between Stephen Harper and his provincial allies. Things get off to a rocky start when all three panellists agree that the falling out is no big deal. Then comes the fun stuff. Link Byfield talks about how Harper has to satisfy Quebec and the West, without completely alienating Ontario. Realizing he's forgotten to mention four of the provinces, he tosses in a coda, which I will paraphrase: "Not to completely forget about the Atlantic provinces."

Forgetting them is OK. Just don't completely forget them.

Then comes the discussion of equalization and the fiscal imbalance. Link decries the fact that so much of Alberta's money is being sent out of the province. It doesn't allow Alberta to save any money in order to build its future (of course, there is enough to send everyone in the province a $400 cheque). Link wants that money to stay in Alberta, and not to be "squandered on social spending elsewhere."

Squandered.

Finally, the equalization discussion wraps up with the notion that the whole program is bad for the provinces that receive the money. It simply doesn't work. That's an idea put forward by the free-marketeers at the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies a few years ago, which seems to be gathering steam. The argument is that instead of lowering taxes and opening the doors to more economic growth, provinces that receive equalization still have higher taxes than those that don't. Uhh, maybe it's because they are poor provinces?

I love arguments like this. Cutting welfare to the poor is an incentive for them to work. But increasing CEO compensation and cutting taxes to the rich is an incentive for them to work harder and create more wealth. Got that?

Catholics in a hurry

Polish Catholics are calling for a fast-track to sainthood for Pope John Paul II, and they're not the only ones who want to see the most media-loved of pontiffs elevated as quickly as possible.

The late Pope was himself a practitioner of the fast-track approach, as Christopher Hitchens points out in his excoriation of Mother Teresa ("The Fanatic, Fraudulent, Mother Teresa"), and the speed with which she was beatified:

"It used to be that a person could not even be nominated for 'beatification,' the first step to 'sainthood,' until five years after his or her death. This was to guard against local or popular enthusiasm in the promotion of dubious characters. The pope nominated MT a year after her death in 1997."

Why the rush? The Catholic Church defends its opposition to much that is common practice in our world by appealing to tradition. On the other hand, the Church is cashing in on celebrity culture, keeping its heroes in the spotlight by moving quickly to promote them after death.

emcleprods.com anyone?

DomainsAreFree (they're not, by the way), offers a random domain name generator. As the site itself points out, most of what it comes up with is "hogwash." But hogwash can be fun! And there is the odd one in there that you could conceivably imagine being used by someone. Epsonone.com, for instance, or zonsontech.com.

Hot tip: If you want to register zermsomp.com for yourself, it's still available. But for how long?

Groat's Syndrome

There's not a lot of solid medical information available online about Groat's Syndrome. And for good reason. It's a fictional disease mentioned in Season Two of HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm. (In the episode in which it appears, Rob Reiner is raising funds for research into Groat's, which causes hyperactivity and nervous behaviour.)

So what to make of this Web forum post, appearing here?

"As a sufferer of Groats syndrome it hard for me to keep me concentration long enough to write this message however leaving a band isn't like cancelling cable, these people have helped you, you got to go in there. That being said it's hard to recap the skills you can offer a band, I remember the recap for me is like 6 months and that's just the crib."

Is it a joke? Possible, but not likely, since there's nothing jokey about the rest of the page (I've seen a MySpacer write that she has Groat's, but she was clearly kidding).

Is the writer looking for sympathy? Or using the old victimization tactic to be heard more clearly? (I suffer from this, so you should pay more attention to my views on this completely unrelated issue.)

Or did this person see the episode and say, "Hey! That must be what I've got!" Kind of scary, if that's the case. Internet-and-TV-based self-diagnosis techniques clearly have their drawbacks.

Who is the mystery woman?

It's a couple of months old, but odds are you haven't seen it. Back in March, the National Film Board of Canada and the Brazilian Audiovisual Secretariat signed an agreement of cooperation.

The Canadian ambassador to Brazil's website has a story, accompanied by a photo in which NFB chair Jacques Bensimon hands the Brazilian minister of culture a piece of art from Canada.



All well and good. But here is the sentence that appears in the story above the image:

"At the end of the ceremony, Mr. Bensimmon [misspelled!] presented Minister Gil with the gift of a piece of art by a Canadian aboriginal woman."

Got that? "A Canadian aboriginal woman." No name. Her artwork was important enough that it was selected as a gift for the minister -- following a meeting at which cultural diversity was one of the topics under discussion.

"A Canadian aboriginal woman." Hands up if you think this would have happened with a non-aboriginal -- even a folk artist.

Rodney MacDonald: master negotiator

There's been no work at the Stora Enso paper mill in Nova Scotia since December 2005. More than 600 workers are locked out, and the dispute affects not only them, but also the mill's suppliers -- including woodlot owners who will be in deep trouble if the mill goes under.

Stora Enso, a Finnish multi-national that made 357.5 million Euros in operating profit in 2005, is looking for concessions from the union, the government, and the power company (Stora is Nova Scotia Power's biggest customer, with the Nova Scotia mill spending $85 million on electricity in 2004).

With an election looming (and now called) Nova Scotia premier Rodney MacDonald rode in to the rescue. In a story in the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, he sums up how his government is willing to help Stora:

"We gave $65 million over seven years for the land, we’re reducing corporate tax that will benefit in future years, we also put in place an energy credit so if they make a capital investment they can get up to 25 per cent rebate on that and the Nova Scotia Utility and Review Board is looking at the issue of power rates for large industrial users, so we’re doing our part."

Great. But wouldn't you think, if you were coughing up this kind of money for a big corporation, you might -- just might -- insist on getting something in return? Like maybe a guarantee that the company will stop playing hardball with its workers?

Instead, the company graciously accepts the taxpayers' largesse, then turns around and tells the union that the mill will close unless there are serious concessions from the workers.

And Rodney? He's reduced to pleading. "What has to happen is that the union and Stora Enso have to get back to the table," MacDonald says in the Chronicle-Herald.

The level of discourse keeps rising

I've had a weakness for right-wing American talk radio since just about the time I got my first radio. Do I listen for the intelligent conversation and the astute political analysis? But of course.

Like last night, when I flip on Michael Savage (slogan: "Borders. Language. Culture.") and the first words I hear are, "Am I saying all liberals have a mental disorder?"

Of course, Savage is not without a sense of humour ("Most Americans don't know anything about the Middle East. You're too busy reading about Tolkien's Middle Earth"), and sometimes I have to wonder if the whole thing isn't a big joke to him. After all, this is one of the most right-wing of right-wing talk-show hosts -- but also a guy who, in his previous incarnation as Michael Weiner, was pals with Allen Ginsberg and wrote piles of books on herbal medicine.

Big visions

Looks like we're in for an exciting provincial election campaign filled with big ideas and visions for Nova Scotia.

In a CBC web story on the June 13 vote, Conservative Premier Rodney MacDonald says the campaign "will be about who has the best plan for families." Not to be outdone, those dangerous, raving NDP socialists have come up with the slogan, "A better deal for today's families."

Best paragraph in the whole CBC story pertains to the Liberal leader's view of the campaign: "Liberal Leader Francis MacKenzie said it would be about the things that matter to Nova Scotians."

Congratulations Francis! I love a leader who knows how to boldly take a stand, no matter what the consequences. Don't you?

Propaganda: Two case studies

I was lucky enough to come across two very different instances of propaganda recently. The first has to do with Iraq, the second with flavoured milk. (Come on, tell me, where else are you going to find Iraq and flavoured milk discussed side by side, huh?)

When the story broke, several months back, that the US government was placing news stories written by fake journalists in Iraqi papers (or, more accurately, paying a consulting firm to take care of it for them) I thought it was A Bad Thing. If you're trying to promote democracy and freedom of speech (ostensibly, anyway), it's a good idea to not undermine faith in supposedly free media by planting stories that cast doubt on the publications in their entirety. William Fisher has a good piece on the subject here.

Having just read a couple of examples of the fake news stories though, I've started thinking of them as more dumb than bad.

You know how old propaganda (or current North Korean propaganda) seems so silly? You read this ham-handed stuff and wonder how anyone could ever fall for it. We've gotten a lot more sophisticated, haven't we? Clearly the folks behind the fake news program don't think so -- or at least they don't think the Iraqis have.

Here is an excerpt, courtesy Harper's Magazine, where the articles were reprinted.

Iraqi Army Defeats Terrorism
...The underhanded forces of Al Qaeda remain bent on halting progress and inciting civil war. The honest citizens of Iraq, however, need not fear these criminals and terrorists. The brave warriors of the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) are hard at work stopping Al Qaeda's attacks before they occur.

Wow! No way anyone could spot that for propaganda, is there? "Criminals and terrorists" vs "brave warriors." These articles go on and on in this vein. And to think that most independent journalists earn a pittance, while the Lincoln Group was paid up to US$2,000 for each of these inept pieces that appeared in an Iraqi newspaper.

On to the flavoured milk.

My daughter came home from school this week with an advertising pamphlet from the Dairy Farmers of Canada, pushing flavoured milk. I'm going to leave aside the difficulty I have with the kids bringing home any kind of advertising and with the unassailable in that the milk lobby has with educators, and just look at one paragraph in the pamphlet.

Here it is, my emphasis added :

Milk contains a natural sugar called lactose. Manufacturers don't have to reveal the added sugar content of their products on new nutrition labels. But we can tell you that a 250 ml serving of 2% milk contains about 12 g of sugar in the form of lactose, and that flavoured milk contains more sugar, although that includes both natural sugar and added sugar. To give you a better idea of how much added sugar your favourite flavoured milk product may contain, look at its sugar content and compare it to an identical serving of white milk.

Basically, the milk producers are taking a simple product -- milk -- and tarting it up with added flavour and sugar. How much sugar? They won't tell you. In fact, they make it sound like they can't tell you, because it's not mandated by the nutrition labels. Of course they can tell us whatever they want -- they've just chosen not to instead.

Note also the repetition of the phrase "natural sugar" and the word lactose, designed to reinforce the idea that milk already contains sugar anyway, so what's a little extra?

Breaking down the ice walls

What makes this game so funny? WhenI first played it, I couldn't stop laughing.

The game is so astoundingly simple -- you control a guy who smashes his fist through big walls of ice, with one mouse button as the only control -- that it would probably be a bore if it wasn't funny.

There are a couple of different elements that contribute to the humour. The first one is the absurdity of the situation: smashing your fist through walls consisting of ice bricks. Then there's the incongruity of the character: a very straight-looking man in a suit, who seems completely at ease crashing through thick walls of ice. Finally, there's that "Yeeeaaah!" that he shouts, which seems so out of place for the character, but also fits with the ice crashing theme.

As you can imagine, the game contains very few instructions, but it does make the puzzling promise that you'll get "a memorial banner" for completing it. Don't get your hopes up too high though. I actually did make it to the end (good luck on that last double-thick wall) and there's no payoff. Too bad. I was curious to find out just what a memorial banner might be.

Alice Cooper in Halifax

Somehow, I've managed to get this far in life without ever having seen an Alice Cooper concert. Until now.

Thanks to Sara, who came up with a pair of tickets as an anniversary present, I took in the May 3 Alice show at the Halifax Metro Centre along with my son Callum.

I was well prepared for Mr. Cooper, thanks to my buddy Jay, a long-time Alice fan. Jay says, rightly I think, that no songwriter does a better job of understanding the minds of adolescents. When he heard we were going to the show, he immediately fired 7 CDs to us, including the new one, Dirty Diamonds. You know, it's got to be tough for an artist who's been around as long as Alice. Stick to your old style and people say you're in a rut. Start doing what's trendy and you look pathetic. Cooper mixes it up on Dirty Diamonds, with some solid riffs worthy of the Billon Dollar Babies era, along with a duet with rapper Xzibit and a twisted country-style ballad.

The evening kicked off with a set by hoser hard rockers Helix ("Gimme an R!"), whose career has apparently been given a boost through repeated references on the Trailer Park Boys (there's going to be a Helix tune included in the Boys' upcoming movie). I was antsy to see Alice, and the thought of sitting through 45 minutes of Helix made me feel all squirmy. (I've never owned a Helix album, but years ago when I worked at a pinball and video arcade in Athens, one of the regulars made me a mix tape that included half a dozen of their songs. Go figure.)

The band wasn't too bad, except for singer Brian Vollmer, who is a buffoon. What was he thinking, wearing a bright pink shirt over his paunch and repeatedly somersaulting across the stage? Once, maybe. Twice, tiring. Third time I was worried he was going to throw out his back or break a leg.

Then came Alice. The man is magnetic. Swaggering onto the stage in his top hat, rhinestone-studded leather jacket and ringmaster's cane, he looks, Callum said, like a darker version of Willy Wonka. The show was relentless, with Cooper and the band ripping through the hits with barely a pause, and tossing in a few from Dirty Diamonds. Guitarists Damon Johnson and Ryan Roxie looked like they were having the time of their lives, especially during their guitar duel in the midst of a hot instrumental version of "Black Widow."

The horror stuff was all there too, including the famous guillotine, but there is nothing really shocking about it anymore. It seems almost like wholesome fun. The most disturbing part of the evening actually came at the end, after Alice had introduced the band. That's when we learned that the young woman who appeared on stage as the whip-wielding vamp and as the barely clad ballerina flashing her butt at the audience -- the woman who is attacked by Alice and then turns the tables by chopping off his head -- was "my little girl, Calico Cooper." (pic) She's following in her dad's footsteps, with three horror flicks to her credit already.

Best piece of merchandise for sale at the show: the Woman of Mass Distraction thong.

Word of the day: yegg

A yegg is a thief -- more specifically, a safecracker. According to the OED, the word first appeared in the language in 1903, and may have come from a surname. The American Heritage Dictionary lists its origin as unknown.

I remember being mystified by yegg when I first read it in a collection of Dashiell Hammett stories called The Continental Op. The book gathers a few of the many stories Hammett wrote featuring the Op, an employee of the Continental Detective Agency.

The stories are full of yeggs and ex-yeggs. When I finally put down the book and picked up the dictionary, I was suprised to learn what yegg actually means. Why? Well, it's a tough-guy word, but it doesn't sound tough at all. For one thing, it brings to mind eggs. Yegg makes me think of egg, and -- in connection with people -- there's a suggestion that someone might be a good egg (there's another obsolete expression -- how many people ever run across a bad egg anymore?). Despite the hard g sound at the end of yegg, the y slides easily into the soft e sound and comes to an abrupt halt. Call someone a yegg and I'd think it sounds like you're insulting them. Clearly, it wasn't always this way. There it is peppering some of the toughest fiction by one of the toughest writers.

I wonder how long-lived yegg was. Did it survive much past the end of the Depression? A good dictionary gives the first reference to a word, if it can. It would be helpful to try and figure out last references too.