Ravishing Light

Moved

2006-02-12T19:08:00.000-05:00

2006-01-24T00:36:00.000-05:00

Vindicated. Finally. I can't actually remember the Mulroney government, or anything about the 1993 election, but for the "What's the difference between the PC Party and a pickup truck" joke, so this is really a new experience. I've been waiting. 1997, 2000, 2004; disappointment after disappointment after huge frigging disappointment. My, but doesn't it feel good to have picked the winner for once, without merely-vicarious interest. The results are currently at 124-103-51-29-1, and while that's not the kind of split I would have liked, it's certainly good enough. It's good enough for at least a year and half or more of relative stability, and a great jumping-off point to try for a majority next time around. I'm satisfied enough, and am heartened to think that it might now be possible to improve from an incumbent position. (And my riding didn't go Liberal, at least. Go to hell, Mahoney.) Finally, on the matter of the Liberal leadership, who'd have ever thought it such a squalid little ending? How did Paul Martin go from the presumptive saviour of Canada, to just the member for LaSalle-Emard? One thing I'll be curious to see at some point in the next five or ten years, and if nobody's written one by then I may just take up the project myself: comparative biography of he and George W. Bush. That would be fascinating - portraits of two men who sought the top job for the sake of avenging Dad's failure, but with very different degrees of success. At least he had the decency - though you'd never have guessed it by this past week's frantic flailing - to concede with some dignity and humility. He's already taken up the invincible mantle of Elder Statesman, though, and we certainly won't have him to kick around for much longer. Now, let's get moving, make zero mistakes, and start working on that record that the CPC is going to be running on circa 2008, what?

2006-01-23T10:36:00.000-05:00

I know what I'd like to happen tonight, but I'm also realistic. Pace a number of ridiculous projections by some with hopes of a landslide Tory majority, I don't see them taking any more than 140 seats at best, and I'm not confident of that. That's fine, really; it'd ensure demonstration of competence and integrity without quite as much risk of hot-button social issues coming up. This has been a great campaign, and I don't think that Tories could have done any better nor Liberals any worse - even if rumours of taking a dive are true - so Harper had better make this count. On that note, I never thought I'd write this, but Warren Kinsella gives me hope for this country. (His post yesterday, specifically.) Not in that he's been bullish on a Conservative victory since the campaign started, out of sheer spite at the Martinite wing of the Liberal Party - though that certainly helps - but this: I don't fear Harper, and neither should you. This is the greatest country in the world, and I believe - I know - he wants to make it better, just like the rest of us. This is a man who bleeds Pantone 186, but he's still capable of understanding and admitting, as too few of his colleagues running the current campaign are, that political competitors are not evil. The act of challenging the Liberal Party is not heresy, nor inherently suspect, and most certainly not unpatriotic. In the event of a Conservative victory, Warren, I expect, will start sniping immediately; as well he should. But he knows that Liberal claims to power are no more or less legitimate, and that's what makes the system work. It's just refreshing to hear that, sometimes. Misinterpretation to the contrary is just poisonous to the polity as a whole. For that matter, I figured I'd have to wait until tomorrow, at least, to see international commentators with only passing understanding of Canadian politics to overstate the case, and put considerably more weight (for good or ill) on the significance of CPC resurgence than it actually has. Fortunately, Adam Daifallah and Andrew Coyne have both had excellent précis published in the New York Times and Sun today. In case of victory, it'll still be fun to see the Kos types and their ilk in the American left wail and moan over the incipient Bush-lackey-led fascist nightmare they no doubt imagine a Canadian Conservative government would mean. Especially Michael Moore; oh, but it would be sweet to see his endorsement make precisely no difference to the outcome of an election, again. I'm still nervous. Nothing, but nothing, is certain. I have hope, though. I believe that the country is finally able to escape from stagnant Liberal hegemony, and with the exception of last week's damaging digressions into speculation on judicial philosophy, this campaign couldn't have gone better for Tories. I hope that's appreciated by the voters. If it's still possible to paint the country blue, it'll happen tonight. I hope.

2006-01-15T10:35:00.000-05:00

CanWest vs. CanWest: Montreal Gazette, January 15: Fresh from negotiating a $5-billion aid deal in Kelowna, B.C. in November with Prime Minister Paul Martin and the premiers, national aboriginal leaders want natives to vote the Liberals back in on Jan. 23, or at least support New Democrats. The Metis believe their ballots could affect as many as 33 close ridings in the western provinces and up north, where natives are as much as one-quarter of some ridings' population. The Conservatives? Forget it - they don't have any real official support. Global National, January 14: OTTAWA -- The Conservative party will today receive an official endorsement from the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples, a group that represents off-reserve natives, sources have told CanWest News Service. Bad timing is one thing - if both stories had been published on the same day, say - but how does one justify a blanket statement like that made by the Gazette a day after one native group has, in fact, officially declared their support for the Conservative platform? Perhaps some editor in the print division of CanWest needs to be paying more attention to what their television colleagues are reporting...

2006-01-11T23:30:00.000-05:00

Erg. This is going to sting, by tomorrow's news cycle: The Conservative Party was not aware that their candidate in the B.C. riding of British Columbia Southern Interior is due to go on trial next month on smuggling charges, and if convicted, he could end up in jail. [...] In July 2004, Zeisman was crossing into British Columbia from the United States, when Canada Customs charged him with attempting to smuggle in a Mercedes-Benz vehicle and 112 containers of alcohol. Zeisman is also accused of lying to Canada Customs about the incident. Zeisman did not explain to CTV News why he didn't tell his own party about the charges, and blamed someone in government for leaking the information. [...] The government knew about the charges, but the Conservative Party admits it didn't check his background with his former employer. Conservative Party Leader Stephen Harper, who signed Zeisman's nomination papers, says he relies on others for such checking. "There is a screening process," Harper said. "My understanding is that it is supposed to look into criminal backgrounds and obviously rely on candidates to be forthcoming with information as well." At best, this lets the Liberals point and say "See, they're no better than us;" that'd still be an advantage at the moment. At worst, this has the potential to sink the whole integrity-competence-wholesomeness trifecta the Tory campaign has managed to establish so far. Zeisman isn't an incumbent, but he is running in a Conservative riding; Jim Gouk won British Columbia Southern Interior by a very slim 680-vote margin last time around. That would make it a targeted riding, and one that it would really hurt to lose. However, that's beside the point: it may be a lost cause now anyway, with this revelation. I doubt it'll happen, but I'd like to see Stephen Harper set an example, and publicly cede the riding. I mean, seriously, an immediate withdrawal, with loud denunciation of Zeisman's ethical lapse. Think about it: this is a teachable moment. If, absent this problematic candidate, the numbers were to stay as good as they are right now, a single seat in BC may not make the difference. Conversely, I suspect holding on to a dead weight has a reasonable chance of collapsing that delicious lead in the national polls. Unless Zeisman has compelling, incontrovertible evidence of his innocence to display to the voters, he's a liability at this point. If the seat were to go NDP, would that be terrible? Is it not better to sacrifice a pawn - and make a none-too-subtle point about what a Tory government would do about shady erstwhile associates - rather than throw the whole damn game? This is the first real challenge of the Conservative campaign so far; up until this point, it's mostly been fun and games while watching the Martinites either lie low, or visibly implode. I hope the key figures in the war room make the right decision, and do it soon. They haven't so far: The Conservatives say despite just finding out about the charges, they will stand by their man and won't pull him out of the race. But they do, indeed, have about eight hours to fix things. Fingers crossed. (Caveat Lector, of course. I figured that this past weekend's headlines speculating on a majority would be the first painful stumble of the campaign, and look how that sunk without a trace. Failing swift, decisive action on the Zeisman front from the party machine, I hope this is lost in the swirl of the prevailing Throw-the-Bums-Out mood in the electorate.) UPDATE, 01/11/06: Good enough, I suppose. It's a shame it took until midmorning to make the decision, though.

2006-01-11T14:02:00.000-05:00

I don't have much to say about the debates and attack-ad embarassment that hasn't already been said, and better; Paul Martin & Co. seem increasingly to be at the point of losing their minds. For that matter, Paul Wells also points out something that hadn't even occurred to me, on the "Soldiers. In Our Cities. In Canada" meme - soldiers (and sailors, and airmen too, etc etc) are everywhere in Ottawa. They're on the street, at the bus stop, in the mall, and at your local sub shop; DND facilities dot the city, and the Major-General Pearkes Building, national HQ, is about as close to the centre of the city's infrastructure as is possible. Knowing this, and being well aware of how much of a non-issue it is - Liberals are shamelessly Ottawa-centric, if anything, and should logically be mildly aware of their surroundings - how did the mental calculus behind that ad even make it to approval for the so-called "draft" stage? The backlash from this one is going to be just delicious. Nonetheless, the Liberals can still pull this off. Backing predators into a corner will tend to make them more vicious and unpredictable than usual, after all. But at this point, it's looking like longer and longer odds that we won't have a new PM in two weeks. That said, with Martin's thunder today delightfully being stolen by the Red Book leak, here's something flippant I've wanted to do for a while: analysis of the various parties' campaign design and typography. In the interests of equal time - but mostly because their logos are almost universally hideous - I'll even include the fringe parties. The Contender: Who? The Typeface: Which font dominates? The Colours: Instant subconscious associations, ahoy. The Logo: What do the non-textual parts of their graphic identity say? What It Says: Does the aggregate logo imply anything in itself? Rating: How effective is this as a brand? The Contender: Bloc Québécois The Typeface: Gill Sans Bold for "Bloc," FF Meta Bold for "Québécois." The Colours: Dark red, dark grey-blue, light blue. The Logo: A smoothly incorporated fleur-de-lys makes this one of the more inherently iconic of federal party logos. What It Says: The Bloc's logo is smooth and modern-looking, skillfully blending two grotesques - a typeface created in 1929 with one of the early 90s - with colours that can't possibly be mistaken to represent anywhere but Quebec. The smooth curve of the fleur-de-lys implies movement and progress, while subtly pointing towards the textual portion of the logo. Excellent and clean. Rating: A- The Contender: Canadian Action Party The Typeface: Varies. In the official logo submitted to Elections Canada, seen above, the party name appears to be Handel Gothic; I'm not sure, as it's too low-resolution. "Hope" and "Espoir" seem to be in one of the knock-offs of Albertus designed to mimic the typographical quirks added to that font when used in the titles of cult TV classic The Prisoner. On their website, it varies between Arial, in the logo seen in a Flash intro page, and Interstate Condensed. Can we say schizophrenic? The Colours: Bright red and dark blue, in fitting with their delusion of being a nationalist party capable of knocking off both Liberals and Tories. The Logo: A map of Canada. An entire map of Canada, including all the fiddly bits that reproduce poorly at small sizes. What It Says: We cannot be trusted. Between occasional use of Arial (more on that below), and the use of radically over-complex imagery in a logo (a good rule of thumb is that you should be able to draw a memorable logo from memory), this screams amateurism. Albertus - or whatever knockoff in particular that is - should never be used with any kind of optical distortion, and that the Prisoner variant (the lowercase E is clipped, quite distinctively) is in use here just prompts further questions vis-à-vis the CAP's motives, competence, and sense of irony. Paul Hellyer's loons are still Paul Hellyer's loons whether or not he's still with them. Rating: D The Contender: Christian Heritage Party The Typeface: Custom logotype in the central "C," Arial in the party name. On their website, the party name is in Eurostile Bold Condensed, for no apparent reason. The Colours: Pale maroon, inexplicably. I have no idea what that's in aid of. The Logo:Nice use of negative space with the maple leaf; most party logos aren't so creative with it. The letterform of the C itself, however, is very 60s-70s, à la Eurostile or similar heavily-geometrical gothic faces. What It Says: Some people hate Comic Sans. They're not wrong to, but I hate Arial more. It's not a Microsoft product per se, unlike Comic Sans, but they did popularize it as a crude and cheap-looking alternative to the exquisitely clean-looking and ubiquitous Helvetica. Anyone who knows the difference will usually avoid Arial like the plague, choosing either the former or another face entirely; that it's managed to make it to an official copy submitted to Elections Canada is not a compliment to the CHP's marketing skill or hiring wherewithal. The use of Eurostile in an updated logo is only slightly better, but does nothing to prevent the unconscious admission of being stuck at a particular spot forty years in the past. At least the central logo itself is simple and recognizable. Rating: C The Contender: Communist Party of Canada The Typeface: None. Impact - a face in similar bad company with Arial as one of Microsoft's awful substitutes for a bold sans serif font included with Windows by default - on their website, but none in the official logo itself. The Colours: In actuality, red, yellow and blue; that it it simply converted to a recognizable B&W version is a credit to the designer. The Logo: A highly stylized conjunction of wheat and a gearwheel superimposed on a maple leaf. What It Says: Honestly? I love this. It's clean, it's simple, it's stylized, and the imagery is immediately recognizable. You don't have to understand a word of English to see the imagery of maple leaf + farming + industry = Canadian communism. That it nods to Russian constructivism in its imagery is likely no accident. They may be evil, but communists certainly do tend to end up with great graphic designers. Rating: A The Contender: Conservative Party of Canada The Typeface: None in logo itself; Frutiger Bold Italic elsewhere in literature. The Colours: Blue. Solid Tory blue, with all the parliamentary tradition that implies. The Logo: Mobius strip-looking stencil C, still - in my opinion - a bit too close to the CanJet logo. What It Says: Bland and inoffensive; focus-grouped to death, I'm sure. I see this as presenting quiet competence, with a good, timeless mid-century Swiss-inspired typeface. Not very exciting, but that's not the goal, is it? Rating:B+ The Contender: Green Party The Typeface: None; Century Gothic or Avant Garde in their signs. Either way, it's futurist and gothic. The Colours: Green and yellow, more or less healthy-looking. The Logo: Maybe it's supposed to be a sun or sunflower, but to me it always brings to mind the very similar pattern of the BP logo. What It Says: Not much. It's bland, a bit too complex in the particular flares of the sun/sunflower, and doesn't really thematically connect to the party. Neither, for that matter, do their fonts; both imply a very 30s or 70s style of design. (Well, maybe that is intentional.) Rating: C+ The Contender: Liberal Party of Canada The Typeface: Antitle Bold Italic, which offers some delightful quirks with dropped serifs; look at the lowercase B, for example. The Colours: Red. Pure Red. Canadian Red. (Obviously.) The Logo: It reminds me a bit of the Canwest crescent, but makes a nice stand-in for a horizon. What It Says: Slick. Maybe a bit too slick. It shows definite professional influence, and not a little bit of graphical panache. Pace what Warren Kinsella said a little while ago about this election being Tim Horton's-vs.-Starbuck's in terms of values, it might be too hip for the Liberals' own good. Rating: A The Contender: Libertarian Party The Typeface: Arial. Gah. The Colours: Green. The Logo: Reminds me of an airplane tail's corporate livery, and needless duplication of the maple leaf seems odd. What It Says: Professional graphic designers? Hell, we can do that ourself and save a couple hundred bucks, right? Rating: D The Contender: Marijuana Party The Typeface: Arial. Gah, again. The Colours: Sickly ~~puce~~ ecru and sage, I suppose meant to bring to mind the funk of pot smoke, grease and sweat that trails after proponents. The Logo: Thankfully simple: Marijuana leaf and a checkmark. Not bad. What It Says: Another evident do-it-yourself effort, but single-issue parties can afford such things, no? Rating: C+ The Contender: Marxist-Leninist Party of Canada The Typeface: Arial. Arial Bold, this time, which isn't really an improvement. The Colours: Too many. Red, maroon, pink, grey, and salmon. The Logo: Too many layers, and the symbolism loses meaning when submerged in borders within borders. Surely they could have managed to come up with something using just the hammer and sickle, or socialist rose, no? What It Says: Like the CAP's, this logo is just too busy. The acrostic of the party acronym is fantastically overkill. I guess the splitters didn't manage to attract any of those sharp designers when they left. Rating: C The Contender: NDP The Typeface: Futura Extra Bold. The Colours: Orange and green, in what have become their signature colours for no particular reason. The Logo:A fluttering maple leaf in green; a nice touch to imply movement, progress, and environmentalism, to be sure. What It Says: Blunt and humourless, but certainly earnest. The use of a heavy gothic typeface is nice for a party of technocrats. Rating: B+ The Contender: Progressive Canadian Party The Typeface: Gill Sans, maybe. With an awful embossed effect. Sweet Zombie Jesus, people. The Colours: Pale blue and pale red, as befits former Red Tories too fainthearted for the new CPC. The Logo: An outlined maple leaf in the background. What It Says: We've got a copy of Microsoft Word, and nothing else. Rating: D The Contender: Western Block Party The Typeface: None; sloppy hand-lettering. The Colours: None. The Logo: A map of the west. A badly sketched map of the west. What It Says: We actually scanned the bar napkin we sketched this out on and sent it to Elections Canada; that is, in fact, how useless we are. Rating: D- The Contender: First Peoples National Party of Canada The Typeface: Papyrus, a calligraphic face inspired by Carolingian letterforms in a faux-Egyptian effect, which is a decidedly odd choice. The Colours: Red, white, orange, yellow, black, and grey. The Logo: Appears to be a mystery-meat navigation aid for a GeoCities-hosted website, circa 1998. One that might involve fantasy literature. With dragons. What It Says: You're not going to vote for us anyway, so why not play up the generic imagery of the Exotic Other, despite it not fitting our particular socioethnic group very well? Rating: B- Much like the Devil gets all the best tunes, it appears that the Liberals and assorted socialists collectively have the best logos. Ominous!

2006-01-07T22:07:00.000-05:00

I went out to vote today by special ballot. I had to go to the local returning office anyway - this year, annoyingly out near the Tunney's Pasture area - to fix my registered address, in any event; despite getting it right last time, this year Elections Canada sent the notice of registration to my parents' home address. This would be a problem, what with having lived at my current address for the past three years. (As ever, I'm glad I no longer live in the riding of Renfrew-Nipissing-Pembroke; at least here, Kobayashi Maru though Ottawa Centre may be, I'm not faced with the distasteful dilemma of Cheryl Gallant.) Being there anyway, I decided that I may as well, rather than have to schedule making it over to my assigned polling station on E-day. Mondays are particularly class-heavy for me this term, and the temptation to skip it after a long day of lectures might well have been overpowering. So, yes, I've cast my vote for Keith Fountain, despite the mildly unsettling prospect of voting for someone who looks about 16. The Conservative campaign, though far too squishy for my taste in many policy aspects has nonetheless been delightfully hyper-competent. Also, one of my fears about policy and strategy has been acceptably assuaged, with the politically tone-deaf segments of the party who wanted to fight an election entirely upon opposition to gay marriage kept firmly under wraps. At least, to this point. There's still plenty of time for some loose cannon (a-hem) or another to blow the whole game. (Don't get cocky, people.) In the local context, I fear Richard Mahoney is going to win, with a lot of the centrist support Ed Broadbent had on the basis of the electorate's warm feelings towards politically-resurrected elder statesmen melting away. Uncomfortable as the prospect was, I would have considered the NDP candidate, Paul Dewar, if he seemed to have a better chance. (Anything to stop a Grade-A Martin crony, and all that.) However, I don't have enough confidence in Dewar or his campaign to prevent being steamrolled by scarily dedicated and well-funded Martinites. Rank-and-file Liberals mildly embarrassed at and honestly trying to overcome the reputation the party leadership et al have established for them over the past decade are one thing; close personal friends of the PM with a jones for winning a trophy seat are quite another. That said, Dewar might still come up the middle if any of the Red Tory votes Mahoney snapped up last time fall to the eminently-moderate Fountain, as several posters at the Election Prediction Project surmise. Since a Conservative win is next-to-impossible here, that'd still be an acceptable outcome; either that, or a Mahoney win that turned out to end up in opposition. (I'll take my schadenfreude where I can get it, thank you very much.) In a way, the election is over for me. Convenient though special ballots and advance polls may be, they do have a way to take some of the fun out of the process. Now all that's left is to watch the race (making comments of varying snark and cheer, depending), and hope that I made a good bet.

2006-01-05T18:05:00.000-05:00

I continue to be fascinated by the photo newswires; my observation last week about the curiously good visual coverage Stephen Harper is getting (and, conversely, the PM's campaign getting stuck with more of the less-photogenic shots) seems to be continuing to hold true. Again looking at the Yahoo News aggregator, which showcases the highlights of the various wire services' photos, what do we see over the past few days? Harper looking vaguely determined, in an indeterminately benevolent way: Check, check and check. He's even caught on film smiling in a way that seems more genuinely cheerful than usual, which is a big bonus. (Well, it's not as though he doesn't have good reasons to be cautiously upbeat today...) On the other hand, there's the Liberal campaign. Martin caught in bizarre, goofy poses: Check, check (Did Liberal observers of the 2004 US election learn nothing from John Kerry's 'Bunny Suit' fiasco, or Gilles Duceppe's hairnet issues last year?) and check. (As for a related subset, Martin caught in midpoint of innocuous nervous habits that only look odd out of context: check.) How about Martin looking mildly dazed or befuddled, upstaged by women seeming to be the most competent-slash-awake person in the shot? Yup; both his wife in one pic, and the Minister for Strategic Self-Promotion in another. Martin as a tiny figure speaking to an unseen audience in a seemingly empty hall? Mmm-hmm. Most unnervingly, Martin engulfed by threateningly amorphous blobs? Oh yes. For what it's worth, what Layton and Duceppe photo ops that make it onto national feeds seem generally positive, except for one that unfortunately makes Jack! look a bit like a retired math teacher, or maybe a dapper insurance salesman. Still, the trend seems clear; this remains a more positive (or at least more restrainedly neutral) coverage of a Conservative campaign in photos that I'd possibly expected, with the Liberals getting the brunt of overly-clever editorializing-by-camera angle. There haven't been any shots of the PM in anything so positive as the decidedly beatific poses of last year so far, anyway...

2006-01-04T00:12:00.000-05:00

In keeping with the lighter vein I've been on lately, let's look at the political ramifications of nepotistic hackery - but via a scene from The Venture Bros., a superlative parody of the Jonny Quest style of heroic adventure animation popular in the 1970s, and itself a further spin on the tropes popularized by the character of Doc Savage and his pulp imitators in the 30s and 40s. A finer series, so pitch-perfect in both its satiric and earnestly thematic elements, is probably not to be found in Cartoon Network's lineup. In this episode, the incompetent Dr. Venture has been sought out by reclusive, disabled and not at all similar to Walt Disney, oh my, no theme park magnate Roy Brisby, with an offer to buy the entire research work of his Doc Savage-like super-scientist father on cloning: Dr. Venture: Well, I don't know if I've kept any of Dad's old notes. Mr. Brisby: Don't play coy with me; of course you kept them! You've been riding his corpse's coattails your entire adult life! Dr. Venture: Hey! Where do you get off? You don't know me! Mr. Brisby: Oh, I know you, Dr. Venture. My researchers are very thorough. For instance, you're not actually a doctor of anything. You never finished school. I also know that since you took over Venture Industries, profits have gone... Zip-a-dee-doo-dah. (On the fictional side of things, as long as I'm making topical viewing suggestions, see also: Development, Arrested.) Dynasties - especially the political or corporate varieties - are tricky things, aren't they? Name recognition may get you in the door, but you'd better be able to perform once sitting in the big chair. George Bush used to get a lot of flack for being "Junior," imagined by opponents to be a lesser clone of his father - at least, considerably more than now, on that particular angle of attack. Likewise the current Mayor Daley of Chicago, who lost his first bid for Daley Senior's old job, only to later start a similar streak; tying dear old Dad's 21-year record will take only until 2010, at this point. On the other hand, you can also have scions that screw up the whole family gig with pervasive mediocrity, like Ohio Governor Bob Taft, who's probably retroactively damaged the reputation of his great-grandfather. Or, in the Canadian context, Paul Martin. Some pundits - Warren Kinsella immediately comes to mind, but there are others - seem to take perverse glee in naming the PM as "Paul Martin Junior" when they really want to twist the knife vis-à-vis the scandal of the day. I can't; not only is it untrue - his father's middle names differ - but calling attention to his father's career and reputation is a needlessly petty way to casually belittle the man. At least, it is when he does such a good job of riding that corpse's coattails all by himself: "What if decades ago, Tommy Douglas and my father and Lester Pearson had considered the idea of medicare and then said, 'Forget it, let's just give people 25 bucks a week?"' Martin asked. Well, I daresay we'd have a less neurotic country today, sans the myth of increasingly-inefficient socialized medicine justifying an undeserved self-image of Canada the Good, but that's neither here nor there. No, my issue with random accusation of Stephen Harper will destroy Canada! #253 is the name-dropping of his father's reputation: Why? Why does he do this? The senior Martin, whatever the popular legend of his being his generation's Saviour of the Liberal Party, never actually managed that feat, and his son's done a pretty thoroughly mediocre job of pulling it off himself. As Kinsella, for one, is delighted to remind anyone and everyone at any opportunity, Paul Martin's major accomplishment as leader has been the palace coup that put him in power and forced the Chretienite wing of the Liberals into exile. It's not as if he's even run a particularly competent campaign so far; as Bob Tarantino notes today, he's now seeming so politically tone-deaf (invoking the name of Mike Harris, which, while it might fire up the die-hard Liberal base with loyal baying for right-wing blood, has a reasonable chance of backfiring with the undecided Ontario middle who re-elected Harris in 1999 for law-and-order reasons in a climate not far off from today's) it's astounding. One has to wonder, at this point, about where the fabled Martin reputation for political brilliance was even born; the Hidden Agenda trope that won last time was the rhetorical equivalent of a baseball bat. Without benefit of Harper or loudmouth Tory backbenchers shooting the CPC in the foot, and subsequently being forced to improve his game, it now seems that wildly swinging such blunt instruments might actually be the limit of the PM's tactical finesse. Between the seemingly improving-and-stabilizing poll numbers, and poor Liberal performance so far, I think I'm prepared to say that this election is now Stephen Harper's to lose - and while there's still probably a better-than-even chance of that, if so, it certainly won't be because of Martin's vaunted political acumen or crack campaign team. A dynasty is a terrible thing to waste, no?

2006-01-03T00:36:00.000-05:00

The polls are worrying me. These kind of numbers might be peaking just a bit too soon, and the gut-wrenching awfulness of panicky backlash, like last year's, is a frightening prospect. Though it does, thankfully, appear that such backlash may be muted, it's not much helping that nervous twitch in my neck I get every time I see a TORIES GAINING headline. The solution, as ever, is simple: write at length on a heartily frivolous topic to take my mind off the problem. It shouldn't come as much of a surprise that I watch a lot of Teletoon, Canada's pale imitation of animation-focused American cable station Cartoon Network. It's my default channel, the one that I tend to rest on when nothing else is on and the repeated loops of the news networks are getting on my nerves. (CTV Newsnet in particular - and I could swear I made comments to the CRTC at their request that helped to successfully lift that annoying little requirement from their broadcast license. Oh well; I guess old habits die hard.) Sure, I've seen every episode of Futurama, Family Guy and Home Movies dozens of times over, now - often muted - but that kind of repetition is still better than most of what the broadcast networks have to offer. What this does mean, however, is that I'm particularly sensitive (so used to the usual patterns of them as I am) to any change in programming, promos, bumpers, station identification, etc. Promos for the newest block of special programming only showed up today or yesterday, and no information, unfortunately, is yet available on the Teletoon website. Let it not be said that the enforced incompetence of Cancon rules imposed upon Corus in determining the station's programming is somehow made up for with marketing savvy in 'New Media' areas. Hell, look at the extent of what they've accomplished, under their late-night program block brand name of "The Detour," to promote marquee series Bromwell High - and what British co-producer Channel 4 has. (Both links highly NSFW.) The latter is an excellent example of interactive Flash with original animation; the former is...somewhat less so. In any event, the special block is horror-themed, titled "The Dead of Winter" - and interestingly enough, seems to feature all the same wonderfully 80s series that were picked up for a temporary run for Halloween-themed blocks last October: The Real Ghostbusters, Beetlejuice, and rare permutations of Scooby-Doo. That's nothing short of brilliant, and I don't just say that because I love at least two of those. Indeed, it's a joy to see The Real Ghostbusters again; not only is it a show featuring many excellent scripts by later Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski, but it also has the power to engender soft pink feelings of nostalgia for that circa-1990 point in my childhood when I was absolutely obsessed with the entire Ghostbusters franchise, and those are probably qualities of equal merit. (Seriously. Obsessed. I picked my first pair of glasses based on the premise of wanting to look like Egon - and not with Harold Ramis' prissy little wire-rims from the movie, either, but the perceptually thicker frames of the animated Egon's character design. Yikes, huh?) Beetlejuice, likewise, is another blast of nostalgia, yet manages (by virtue of the actual production being contracted out to Canadian animation house Nelvana) to fulfill part of the daily schedule's Cancon quota. More interestingly, it's probably the most Tim Burtonesque of all subsidiary works based on Tim Burton's increasingly bizarre oeuvre, with direct thematic links to The Nightmare Before Christmas, Sleepy Hollow and Corpse Bride; it's the full extension of the expanded universe from which all Burton's Gothic meandering is drawn. Even more interestingly, the writers somehow managed, by sheer force of will, to paper over the whole statutory rape-based premise of Beetlejuice and Lydia's relationship established in the original film. That's some accomplishment for an animated spinoff that's still pretty dark, even if it does occasionally drift into clumsily rendered Relevant Childrens' Themes of the period. (I sometimes wonder how anyone growing up in the early 90s managed to avoid a neurotic complex over the persistent unwillingness of the entire planet to embrace vaguely-justified, simplistic environmentalism, of the kind that was for a time ubiquitous on Saturday morning TV.) For these, then, I can most definitely applaud a weird kludge of a programming theme; kudos to whatever Teletoon executive sold their boss on reusing the entire Halloween block in situ. Now, if only the same persuasion could be applied to arranging for more than sixty minutes per week of Cartoon Network's Adult Swim original series, perhaps in lieu of an episode or two of Family Guy on the non-Canadian side of the programming ledger...

2006-01-01T17:55:00.000-05:00

It almost seems as though someone is trying to communicate something about the credibility of disgraced professional athletes in this story's layout, but I just can't tell what...

2005-12-31T13:38:00.000-05:00

I had the opportunity last week to read The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, an entertaining little piece of pop sociology with a simple premise: Massive changes happen due to marginal changes. When a certain threshold is reached - not necessarily one that can be predicted beforehand, or even realized in retrospect - further change progresses rapidly and exponentially. Gladwell's analysis is a bit irritating in that it's mostly isolated (though impressive) examples offered in support of generalized 'laws,' without a useful, transferable conclusion, but the theory of the tipping point in itself is an interesting one to explore. While I think it's long been evident that the Canadian media as a whole tends to skew left, or at least anti-conservative - often expressed in support, with varying grades of subtlety, for Liberal policies and personalities - such an institutional bias remains a guarantee of nothing. Indeed, for whatever reason, the media as a whole - led by the Globe & Mail , Toronto Star and others - seems to be turning against Paul Martin at an ever-increasing rate, and giving uncannily positive or neutral coverage to the Conservative campaign. I'm inclined to think this might be rooted in some degree of cynical marketing groupthink, to be honest; attempting to demonstrate to the rubes, provincial and dull, that there are newspapers besides Quebecor's Sun chain that aren't entirely in the Liberals' back pocket. The evidence for this isn't much, I'll admit, but it's growing - and a good example is in the daily trickle of photojournalism. Yahoo! News' photo feed is a good example, collecting the most iconic of CP and others' work. The interesting thing here is that most shots of Martin are amazingly unflattering, making him seem old, tired, dazed, or choleric, and often including that charmless little grimace he seems to believe is similar to a genuine smile. Even that one shot of the PM looking unnervingly like a cornered, depressive skeleton that surfaced yesterday, in reporting the income trust probe and concurrent Liberal slippage in the polls, was dug up from AFP's archives of this past May. It's been hard to find a still photo of Paul Martin looking appealing lately, and it's not as though making him look Prime Ministerial is particularly difficult, with the right camera angle. Conversely, photos of Stephen Harper seem much more likely to be neutral or blandly flattering. I and many other have noted how he's suffered photogenically in the past, looking somewhere between unconvincingly cheerful and just plain creepy, but he's improved considerably of late; either that, or what unappealing photo ops he's had lately have been largely ignored. For instance, the Globe & Mail's story about the pre-emptive Tory strategy to deflect negative Liberal ads with an inoculatory one of their own is accompanied by a shot of...Harper climbing into a minivan. One might make the case that this was chosen to imply, with his reflection visible in the foreground window, some sort of two-faced personality, but I think that's a stretch; more than anything, it's just dull. I'm sure it wouldn't have been hard to find a photo of him in a vaguely sinister pose, if that was what the editor in question wanted. So do we have a case of selection bias here, in the choice of photos that make it out on the wires, and are subsequently run by a number of media outlets? I have no idea. Maybe it is just the old horse-race mentality, with no further calculation or connivances required. But I hope it's a real sea change, and a harbinger of popular opinion - and if that's true, maybe we can count on exponentially growing movement in the polls as we near E-Day.

2005-12-29T12:46:00.000-05:00

One of the things I dislike about the post-Christmas period is that I can never get anything useful done. The advertising business, while due to pick up in January, is still semi-comatose until after New Year's Day. I have plenty of time to finish designs right now, but unfortunately, not much of a backlog to occupy me, and no classes until about the same point. So, how can I best kill time? Inane statistical analysis based on impractical fantasy, of course! Here's John Ibbitson in a Q&A session on the Globe & Mail's site, in a semi-humourous aside on the matter of Canadian-American relations: It has been said that the greatest gift Canada could bestow on humankind would be to voluntarily accept annexation by the United States, thus ensuring Democrat administrations in perpetuity. That said, I do believe this goes beyond simply a clash of administrations. Both countries need to openly assess shared and differing values, working to accentuate the former and minimize the consequences of the latter. (Really? Who's said that, exactly?) On his point, though...well, you'd think so, wouldn't you? I mean, of course a Greater United States including Canada would produce an overwhelming and perpetual liberal majority that would ensure Republicans to be unelectable for all time, right? But that got me thinking, and after doing some calculations*, in fact, the central premise of the joke turns out to be considerably less accurate than one might imagine. After 2000 and 2004 I'm sure everyone understands the Electoral College, and its indirect relationship to population weight. Each state receives a number of electoral votes equal to the sum of its representatives in the House, plus two Senators. However, the size of the House is currently fixed at 435**, and has been since 1913, after reapportionment conducted on the basis of the 1910 census. So, let's say for the sake of argument that Canadians were to suddenly rise as one tomorrow, and demand annexation by the United States. The size of the House might well be changed entirely, but let's say the proportionate weight of representation remained the same, with something like one representative per 645,000 people. (This is a slightly fudged average, as reapportionment is manually tweaked by Congress, but it's close enough.) If the size of the House were to remain the same in the enlarged United States, that ratio would drop to 1:725,000 or thereabouts. Remember, too, that this isn't a constant; each state, no matter the population, receives at least one representative in the House, as does DC. All of this means that existing states would see their share of the Electoral College's votes decrease, whether in absolute numbers or merely in proportion to the whole. Let's also assume that, of the former provinces, most would mimic voting patterns of their nearby counterparts, with Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes falling neatly into the Northeastern Democratic voting bloc, and the prairies and territories into the Midwestern Democrat-leaning group that includes Wisconsin and Minnesota. (Assuming Quebec to be still a part of the former Canada-slash-greater US at this point, something of a counterfactual quandary.) Only Alberta might be considered a conservative stronghold to the effect that presidential elections would semi-reliably trend Republican. BC is a remote possibility, I think, but would probably be safely Democratic. So, what do we have, then? This projection of electoral votes and probable affiliations: (The number of electoral votes I've allocated are based on, again, a slightly fudged formula for representation in the House, which means that this is necessarily even more of a blue-sky projection than the premise necessitates.) If we assume 2004-like voting patterns - probably the best conceivable showing for Republicans in the present context - this adds up to a 294-270 Democratic victory. That's a healthy margin, but not quite an Electoral College landslide à la 486-52 for LBJ in 1964, 520-17 for Nixon in 1972, or 489-49 for Reagan in 1980. In fact, it looks like nothing so much as a slightly skewed version of the status quo. If BC flipped, it'd be only 286-278. If the territories weren't given full representation as states, but only a single token representative (and possibly Senators) between the three of them, something akin to DC or Puerto Rico's oddball arrangements, that edges the math even further towards a complete tossup. Moreso, if Quebec is taken out of the equation. In short, Ibbitson's glib rejoinder falls prey to that all-too-Canadian delusion of significance that confuses geography with population; true, the State of Ontario would be ranked fifth in size behind California, Texas, New York, and Florida, but most of Canada would be in the bottom twenty. So, who's up for annexation now, then, after the myth of a permanently enshrined Democratic Party turns out to be only a statistically minor boost? A two or three-state gap wouldn't be so wide it couldn't be swung, y'know... * All population numbers from Wikipedia, because I'm too lazy to delve through the godawful layouts of StatsCan and the Census Bureau's respective sites. I did enough of that last term, thank you very much. ** There's a minor exception, I know, on the admission of Hawaii and Alaska. But only a minor one, designed to maintain the ~435 standard, which I think supports my point.

2005-12-28T22:58:00.000-05:00

I'm a creature of habit. (To say the least.) Unfortunately, that means being forced out of my sleepwalk of comfortable routines, even for a few days, is very nearly traumatic. I spent Christmas through Boxing Day with family outside of Toronto, and I'm still in a semi-dazed state of recovery. That wouldn't be a problem, except that it tends to lead to lapses in awareness and judgment, such as managing to misplace bus tickets, celery, or ATM receipts, all of which I managed in a span of ten minutes while out grocery shopping today. Or, for instance, failing to notice amusing quasi-Engrish until the third time leafing through the manual for my new fuzzy logic rice cooker: Honestly, the third thing hadn't really occurred to me. All of which is to say, this probably isn't the best time to lay out my perceptions of the beta phase of Campaign 2006, but it's not as though they've changed much for the past few weeks. On the subject of the election, indeed, I'm afraid I'm not holding out much hope. To be sure, I can't endorse fits of cynicism like Jay Currie's, predicting a massive Tory collapse nationwide, but I'm afraid another Liberal minority (decreased, perhaps, to a true state of deadlock) seems all too probable. It would be wonderful to end up with a Conservative minority - which I think might be necessary, at this point, to demonstrate to the more easily-frightened parts of the country that the party is mostly centrist - even if that centrism is starting to look a bit like soft-socialism. (Especially when it looks that way to Toronto Star reporters.) Yes, I know that as a tough-on-crime hawkish-foreign-policy free-market mostly-socially-liberal weakly-agnostic Anglo misanthrope (whew), I'm never going to be completely satisfied with the policies of any party, but I'm feeling less upbeat about Tory campaign policies (skillfully triangulated works of domestic realpolitik though they may be) than usual right now. Still, if it takes squishy nationalism and hard-line federalism to win votes, I can put up with ~~a little~~ ideological discomfort. Half a loaf is better than none, and a PM forced to the centre by polling numbers only some of the time would be an improvement on a complete weathervane.

2005-12-27T22:45:00.000-05:00

So, I'm back. Sort of. At least for the duration of the election - but that can wait. It's not as though I've felt I had nothing to say for most of the past term - to that audience such as I have - but more that I've felt I haven't had enough to say. To that end, I'm going to try waxing Lileksian for a while, with regular, multifaceted updates; it might, I imagine, take some of the edge off of having to come up with a fully elaborated thesis (brief though it may be) in separate posts. That, and it'd become a pain to match appropriate lyrics for titles to blog content, so that what started as an innocent - if overly twee - gimmick eventually became an obstacle to casual expression. All that's neither here nor there, however; it's not what's been bothering me over Christmas. The first thing that has is a 1939 MGM animated short, which I caught on Turner Classic Movies on Saturday morning; this was first of all a surprise, because I didn't realize the channel was even available in Canada. I'd also never seen this particular short before, so I was also surprised by its stunning...well...something, be it amorality or naïveté. I'm speaking of "Peace on Earth," which seems to be uncannily well-regarded despite its very specific context. In a nutshell, a strangely secularized (and annoyingly repetitious) chorus of "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing" is a leitmotif for depicting a charmingly crusty grandfather squirrel explaining to his grandchildren who the mysterious "men" of the lyric "Peace on Earth, goodwill to men" are. This is a post-apocalyptic world, you see, inherited by the innocent woodland creatures after the last humans destroyed each other in a massive (and strangely looking to be fought with arms of WWI vintage) war. Among other scenes hanging a lampshade on the simplistic message is one where the younger grandfather squirrel, in flashback, discovers a bible open to the Sixth Commandment, and by gum, not fixin' to cause no harm to other critters what one meets in this big ol' world seems like a jim-dandy idea to him. (I paraphrase, of course, but not much.) To be fair, there is a logical and excusable context for this kind of thinking - or would have been, about a decade prior. It was 1928, after all, that saw the exquisite diplomatic fantasy that was the Kellogg-Briand Pact, espousing the notion that it was, in fact, possible to end the practice of war by legal fiat. After the horrors of the Great War, and without the spectre of German militarism yet visibly back on the horizon, I don't think this was an unreasonable position to take, idealistic though it may have been. By "Peace on Earth's" release on the 9th of December 1939, however, and even by its time of production throughout 1939, well...let's just note that it was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, with all that implies after the invasions of Poland and Finland. The best that can be said about "Peace on Earth" is that it was an idealistic call to pacifism as a realistic foreign policy strategy, one which simply happened, in retrospect, to be very badly timed. I'm more inclined to call it an ugly little piece of deluded, head-in-the-sand isolationism - the steadfast belief, too common in Americans before Pearl Harbor, that what happens over there is none of our business. While technically superb, especially in effect animation and rotoscoping techniques, it's a sad artifact of the period. The whole thing is a reminder of the smug sense of superiority felt by a certain type of person, on the possibility of simply opting out of dealing with unreasonable men - the same sort who would embrace such vapid statements as "War is over, if you want it," two generations later - and how terribly misplaced that belief must necessarily be. The second thing is Doctor Who, and specifically the Christmas special-cum-stealth Season 28 premiere that aired last night on CBC. The Doctor has just regenerated from a painful death in last season's finale, leaving him more or less helplessly comatose (and considerably more David Tennant-shaped) for most of the episode - and inconveniently so, given an invasion of Earth by the barbaric Sycorax, who threaten from their huge city-ship to variously kill or enslave all of humanity merely because they can. Prime Minister Harriet Marsh (who won in a landslide majority after the Doctor's last significant visit to contemporary Earth, where he removed a number of alien conspirators from Number Ten, leaving backbencher Marsh the political heroine of the day) is teleported to the Sycorax vessel, along with her advisors from the government command centre attempting countermeasures against the incipient invasion, and given an ultimatum: Surrender. Fortunately, the Doctor wakes up in time to handily beat the invading leader in a duel and entreat the remaining Sycorax to leave, demanding in their travels that they speak of Earth not as a target ripe for pillage - but as a planet ably defended. As the ship leaves, Marsh orders her aide to initiate the countermeasures they'd been preparing, which turn out to be a Death Star-like convergent energy beam weapon that vaporizes the Sycorax. The Doctor is outraged, of course, as any pacifist of convenience might be. How could humanity be so cruel, he demands? Should he instead be warning the rest of the galaxy of the monsters coming from Earth? Marsh coolly points out that the Doctor, while always the saviour of Earth (and particularly Britain) when around, often isn't, and that she has a duty to protect her constituents from vicious alien invaders of unproven reliability. In retaliation, the Doctor initiates a whispering campaign which is implied to end her political career shortly thereafter. Doctor Who has never been particularly subtle in its politics. The projected future of the late 1970s imagined, in the Doctor's universe, the first female British PM being Labourite Shirley Williams. The Seventh Doctor story "The Happiness Patrol", though brilliantly absurdist at points, was largely a juvenile fit of Thatcher-bashing. However, by comparison, that was a masterpiece of restraint and good taste. What I see in this is another instance of isolationism, but in that oddly post-9/11 European passive-aggressive manner: We liked you better as victims. Come wallow in self-pity with us, and we might help. The French felt "We are all Americans now" when the United States was wounded and laid low; the Doctor can only allow sympathy for helpless primitives he can rely on to require his help. When the hurt or threatened dare to proactively defend themselves - as the Doctor himself could not or would not when his own race was all but exterminated by the Daleks - well, that's beyond the pale. But - and this is key - the destruction of the Sycorax is obviously meant to echo the destruction of the General Belgrano during the Falklands War, as a purported instance of vindictiveness on the part of victorious Britain. I think Wikipedia's analysis thereof is fairly balanced in explaining just what kind of petty moral equivocation this belief is. The other political allusions therein are so inane I shouldn't even try to reply, but for offering a sentiment I hope should be self-evident: Naked pyramids of prisoners, however reprehensible, != summary execution by painful disintegration. I am pretty sure there's some kind of gap between those two concepts. What is my point, then? I'm not sure. But I do know I'm disappointed by the short-sighted petty politics that the BBC sees fit to endorse today, no less than that selfish and cowardly endorsement of pacifism by the Hollywood of 1939. Not only are the inferable accusations of "The Christmas Invasion" unfair and ridiculous, they're not all that consistent with the character of the Doctor, as malleable as that concept is. I came to love Doctor Who after being introduced to it last season, and I'd hate to have to give up on new episodes for the sake of pervasive ideological foolishness.

Workin' so hard that you don't even know you're alive

2005-10-16T17:45:00.000-04:00

Even more agonizingly dull and repetitive than you'd probably think: Poring over want ads running in the April 1961 New York Times, collating and tabulating all conceivably relevant data on positions and salaries offered in the "Help Wanted - Female" category, as qualitative research for a lengthy ~~womens'~~ ~~gender~~ womens' and gender history term paper. Still, it is enlightening, to some degree. I was aware of the jocularly condescending term 'Gal Friday' for female clerical workers - used by 1940, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, and most certainly popularized in common usage by the Howard Hawks film - but not the extent to which it was considered a legitimate job title. An astounding number of listings I've been tabulating so far either give no other title, or else use the term to describe something officially called a stenographic or secretarial position. I can certainly sympathize with the dissatisfaction of early feminists on the count of demanding respect some modicum of basic dignity and respect in the workplace, anyway. (And on that note, let's not even go near the 'Typist/Receptionist' positions that have optimal bra size listed in the job requirements, shall we?) Now, slightly less agonizing: doing the same thing for the counterpart issues of the Globe & Mail. Mainly because they're shorter, and the layout is slightly less eye-wateringly dense. (What? I'm just saying. The Sulzberger family certainly knew how to get their money's worth in paper expenses, way back when.)

Obligatory irregular update #5

2005-10-08T20:54:00.000-04:00

The long and the short of things is, I'm still not dead. Beyond that, though... For the first time in a month, I have nothing imminently due or necessary to prepare for in the foreseeable future (read: "two to three days"). I finished the marathon that was studying for and writing the LSAT last week, and am cautiously confident of a respectable score in the upper range of the scale; I'm done every piece of course-related writing due for another three weeks; and both jobs have calmed down for a bit. I'm in the rather odd position, then, of having forgotten what I usually do for fun beyond multitasking-friendly distractions like music or TV. I'm sure I'll figure it out again just soon enough to be overtaken by a whole new set of suddenly-defined deadlines. On the other hand, I've also created a whole new set of neuroses to cope with, in finally convincing parts of the advertising business to switch. (Y'know, Switch.) Yes, I've finally made my first converts as a Mac evangelist. I should be happy, after selling the virtues of OS X on a semi-ubiquitous basis for the past six months, but I'm kind of terrified, being that I'll be the one ending up providing tech support. Which is to say, I don't remember: have I said anything in an offhand manner about the spiffiness of Tiger recently that's going to come back and bite me? Still, that's a much lesser evil than having to provide the same level of support for a wonky Windows box with unreliable hardware. I've passed on the copy of Brian Tiemann's excellent OS X Panther in a Snap that I no longer need, in hopes that it might forestall some questions, but I think putting in a purchase request for an updated reference work or two on Tiger, as well as a copy of Remote Desktop - just in case - might not be a bad investment either. But now, if you'll excuse me, there's a copy of the Age of Empires III demo that's been sitting on my desktop uninstalled - or even copied to the PC capable of running it - for far too long, and the changes to the resource and trade systems look just plain neat.

To seek revenge may lead to Hell, but everyone does it, and seldom as well

2005-10-02T10:36:00.000-04:00

Even for the NYT, this is a remarkably tone-deaf headline: "To More Inmates, Life Term Means Dying Behind Bars." Just a few decades ago, a life sentence was often a misnomer, a way to suggest harsh punishment but deliver only 10 to 20 years. But now, driven by tougher laws and political pressure on governors and parole boards, thousands of lifers are going into prisons each year, and in many states only a few are ever coming out, even in cases where judges and prosecutors did not intend to put them away forever. Indeed, in just the last 30 years, the United States has created something never before seen in its history and unheard of around the globe: a booming population of prisoners whose only way out of prison is likely to be inside a coffin. A survey by The New York Times found that about 132,000 of the nation's prisoners, or almost 1 in 10, are serving life sentences. The number of lifers has almost doubled in the last decade, far outpacing the overall growth in the prison population. Of those lifers sentenced between 1988 and 2001, about a third are serving time for sentences other than murder, including burglary and drug crimes. Growth has been especially sharp among lifers with the words "without parole" appended to their sentences. In 1993, the Times survey found, about 20 percent of all lifers had no chance of parole. Last year, the number rose to 28 percent. The phenomenon is in some ways an artifact of the death penalty. Opponents of capital punishment have promoted life sentences as an alternative to execution. And as the nation's enthusiasm for the death penalty wanes amid restrictive Supreme Court rulings and a spate of death row exonerations, more states are turning to life sentences. Defendants facing a potential death sentence often plead to life; those who go to trial and are convicted are sentenced to life about half the time by juries that are sometimes swayed by the lingering possibility of innocence. As a result the United States is now housing a large and permanent population of prisoners who will die of old age behind bars. At the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, for instance, more than 3,000 of the 5,100 prisoners are serving life without parole, and most of the rest are serving sentences so long that they cannot be completed in a typical lifetime. About 150 inmates have died there in the last five years, and the prison recently opened a second cemetery, where simple white crosses are adorned with only the inmate's name and prisoner ID number. Wonder of wonders, it seems that life sentences once are again living up to their name, and are as permanent a punishment as the death sentences they often replace. This is supposed to be a bad thing? At the very least, it's nice to see the hypocrisy of early parole for "life" sentences minimized. Of course, the Times seems to think such practices are unusually cruel, because - wait for it - the Western European view is that twelve years is a long sentence. Fascinatingly, they seem to leave out the fact that several Western European countries, including Britain and Italy, hand down life sentences (whether de facto or de jure) regardless of public opinion: In much of the rest of the world, sentences of natural life are all but unknown. "Western Europeans regard 10 or 12 years as an extremely long term, even for offenders sentenced in theory to life," said James Q. Whitman, a law professor at Yale and the author of "Harsh Justice," which compares criminal punishment in the United States and Europe. Michael H. Tonry, a professor of law and public policy at the University of Minnesota and an expert on comparative punishment, said life without parole was a legal impossibility in much of the world. Mexico will not extradite defendants who face sentences of life without parole. And when Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish gunman who tried to kill Pope John Paul II in 1981, was pardoned in 2000, an Italian judge remarked, "No one stays 20 years in prison." Some developing and Islamic nations mete out brutal sanctions, including corporal punishment and mutilation. But if the discussion is limited to very long prison sentences, Professor Tonry said, "we are vastly more punitive than anybody else." Uh-huh. Implications of the moral superiority of Mexican justice (!), and outright equivocation with hand-chopping sharia-spouting madmen - to say nothing of some selective, context-free quotations that could leave the reader with the mistaken impression that the US is the only civilized, modern nation still sentencing the convicted to life without parole. Is it any wonder that legislators, parole board members, and the general public at large might seem increasingly disinclined - if the survey in the lede is accurate - to pay attention to those desperately concerned for the quality of life of aging murderers?

As supernice (nice) a person like you

2005-09-26T22:17:00.000-04:00

Classy. Apple's actually going about refunding the unjustly-collected copyright levy revenues iPods sold in Canada were subjected to, prior to this year - which means I could pocket a surprise $25 for the cost of a stamp; not a bad deal. On the other hand, unclaimed funds will be donated to the Red Cross - and I don't have a problem with that at all. (Come on, you guys; stop being so lovably benevolent. I'm trying not to buy a nano until, at the very least, John Quincy iPod won't hold even a two-hour charge, and things like this could really wear down my resistance. Even taking into account plausible horror stories regarding the former.) (Via TUAW.)

Keep your castles in the air; by building them down there, you'll never learn to fly

2005-09-25T10:19:00.000-04:00

While enjoyable, the animation festival hasn't served up enough this year so fantastically impressive that I feel like doing item-by-item reviews. The one exception to that is The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello (inadequate official site here), which I saw last night in one of the short competitions - and it more than makes up for the godawful abstract shorts (if it looks like it could be a 3D screensaver set to randomly render crystalline objects for six and a half minutes, I'm not interested) or the unsubtle skew of all political subjects (I swear, it's just too easy to pander to a Canadian audience) and then some. No, Jasper Morello is absolutely exquisite, a high-Victorian steampunk tale of gothic horror, animated in a haunting CG-assisted cutout style. The official site above, while sorely lacking in content, offers a brief taste of that style: lanky silhouettes on a background of elaborately-detailed, sepia-toned ironworks. That there's an actual story, and quite a compellingly human one, at that, is no less appreciated; the art of the narrative is often ignored in short animated subjects. Add that to a new and gorgeous way of rendering the increasingly-tired clockwork-computers-and-cast-iron-airships milieu, and the result is a joy to behold. My only complaint is that I wish it had been last in the program, instead of Don Hertzfeld's sometimes-amusing but ultimately overambitious and tedious The Meaning of Life. The former was twenty-six minutes long, but felt like ten; the latter ran only twelve minutes, but seemed to stretch on for an eternity. (There's a lesson there, I think.)

All are tales of human failing

2005-09-23T11:00:00.000-04:00

It's that time again - late September - which means that the Ottawa International Animation Festival is on; and, as usual, I've done the volunteer thing in order to get a free screening pass. I've tried in recent years to pick volunteer positions that get me places otherwise not accessible to the public, and the addition of the Television Animation Conference to the program is perfect, in that regard; yesterday, I managed to catch part of a new format of pitch session while manning a sticky door in the Château Laurier. The pitch I saw - Gumnutz - encapsulates, more or less, everything that could possibly be wrong with television animation. First, it was derivative. The concept of anthropomorphic animals operating a secret magical juice factory in the woods seemed a bit less strained twenty years ago with The Gummi Bears, but, hey, this pitch set the whole thing in Australia, and that could potentially overcome the copycat vibe. More problematic, however - and I was happy to see the entire panel of programming directors from Cartoon Network, Teletoon, Kids WB and Nickelodeon call them on this - was the substitution of multiethnicity (or, to be less kind, what used to be called "comic accents") for genuine characterization, in some sort of bizarre affirmative-action 'casting' policy. Yes, Australia has large Greek and Lebanese populations. So? What does it add to the character of the goofy lizard mechanic to say that he's Lebanese, or to make the mad-scientist henchman of the chief villain a turban-wearing Indian snake? I don't think the characterizations quite veered into genuinely offensive territory, though the Yiddish and aggressively fey bodybuilder characters (as Nickelodeon's Peter Gal pointed out) came awfully close. I don't blame the producers for falling so far into the trap of writing for a PC audience. After all, it's just being Tolerant and Inclusive, right? Even if it ends up being a series set in the Australian Outback with exactly four characters out of a large ensemble cast who aren't defined in terms of what kind of hyphenated-Australian they are? That, while annoying, may be a necessary evil; I know Australia has a domestic film and TV-subsidizing bureaucracy much like Canada's, and pandering to those bureaucrats for grant money may entail some degree of kowtowing to Goodthink. That's only the most significant problem, however, among an unfocused and overambitious plot arc, some surprisingly dark subject matter, and a blandly traditional design style. I'd be surprised if Gumnutz is ever produced - at least, in any form resembling the current pitch.

The rats on the street all dance 'round my feet

2005-09-19T10:33:00.000-04:00

Curse you, Lileks. I'll never again be able to think of the Stratford Festival without mentally transposing the phrase "St. Ratfood" into a Southern Ontarian theatrical context.

Time is getting on, there's still so much to do

2005-09-17T19:09:00.000-04:00

So, here's the thing: I'm still busy. Really busy. That's not necessarily a problem in itself, but it's caused me to realize I have to more or less give up resisting something I'd hoped to avoid: the prospect of more often buying prepared foods or (shudder) eating out. Yes, I'm still a student, but I've always taken a certain degree of pride in not having the stereotypically wasteful, ignorant, and economically unsound eating habits of one. I buy in bulk and cook from scratch; I always have some kind of soup or stew made and on hand for quick meals; I roast, sauté, double-boil, steam, and bake. I keep a regular stock of all-purpose garnishes like balsamic vinegar, fresh limes, and cilantro, for pity's sake. In short, I take it as a personal failing to not eat well, reasonably nutritiously, and cheaply. That's why it hurts so much, between classes and work, to not have the time to do little things like bake bread or make a brown stock: I feel guilty about it. I'm now making enough (well, to be fair, an amount I'd have called 'crazy stupid improbable' for my age and experience, not too long ago) money from my various jobs that I can certainly afford to eat out daily, or have frozen dinners morning, noon and night, but, crikey, the guilt. It just gnaws away at me. I can't stop myself from analyzing every dish, and calculating exactly how much the restaurant or manufacturer's markup is. Obviously I can't argue with that markup involved in labour and capital expenditures, but it's painful nonetheless, to know that (barring exceptionally complex recipes) if I had a little time and the ingredients on hand, I could cook something just as good for half to a quarter of the price. Curséd be the man who knows the worth of every onion and olive! I know it's silly, and that my time is right now often worth considerably more than potential savings on staples. Yet, somehow, that's not really a comfort. At least I can take the necessity as an opportunity to explore restaurants near campus...

Fortune favors the free

2005-09-12T09:06:00.000-04:00

The hell? Toronto — Seeking to end months of debate, Premier Dalton McGuinty now says "there will be no sharia law in Ontario" -- an announcement that should quell a growing public-relations crisis concerning the use of Islamic law, but which also exposes Queen's Park to attacks from other religions. Following widespread condemnation of a plan that would formally allow the tenets of sharia to be used in resolving family disputes, the Premier said he'll make the boundaries between church and state clearer by banning faith-based arbitrations. [...] "I'm so happy today. It's a victory for the women's rights movement," said Homa Arjomand, an Iranian immigrant who has launched a campaign to stop sharia in Ontario. "Women's rights are not protected by any religion," she said. But fundamentalist Islam, in particular, can be harsh, she said. "Divorces are happening behind closed doors and the woman is banned from having custody of her children," Ms. Arjomand said. "She is being sent back to her home country to live with her relatives." She went so far as to say that proposed new laws ought to allow for the prosecution of religious leaders involved in faith-based arbitrations. While it's unlikely that amendments to the Arbitration Act will go that far, Mr. McGuinty told The Canadian Press yesterday that "I've come to the conclusion that the debate has gone on long enough. There will be no sharia law in Ontario." "There will be no religious arbitration in Ontario," he said. "There will be one law for all Ontarians." Make no mistake, this is fantastic news - the very idea of enacting a right to misogynistic, homophobic, and xenophobic private law (or even, in passing, allowing it in lieu of promoting the exercise of genuine and completely secular legal rights) in Ontario was abominable. It's unfortunate that others will pay the price for having to disallow sharia-based arbitration: Ontario explicitly gave the green light to such practices in its 1991 Arbitration Act. But as early as this fall, new Ontario laws may put a stop to religion-based settlements in matters such as child-custody disputes or inheritances. This means that orthodox Jews and some Christian leaders may soon make a common cause with fundamentalist Muslims in seeking to limit the scope of the new proposals. "Our reaction is we're disappointed, we're very disappointed," said Joel Richler, chairman of the Ontario wing of the Canadian Jewish Congress. "It's what we consider to be a knee-jerk reaction against the sharia issue." He said orthodox Jews have used tribunals to settle family disputes for centuries, but the future of these tribunals is no longer clear in Ontario. As I say, unfortunate. But it's surely better to enact strict equality before the law than to let a minority of well-meaning exceptions turn into nightmarish abrogations of justice. That said, isn't this a 180-degree turnaround? I could have sworn that up until very recently - last week, even - the premier was singing quite a different tune on the threat sharia poses: TORONTO -- The rights of women "will not be compromised" if Ontario becomes the first Western jurisdiction to allow Muslims to use a set of religious rules known as Shariah law to settle civil and marital disputes, Premier Dalton McGuinty said yesterday. At least he came to the right conclusion in the end, which is something, for a constantly-triangulating Liberal leader. Finally, I'm happy that the provincial Tories aren't seizing this as a socially conservative wedge issue: "By letting it go on, and suddenly ending it mysteriously on a Sunday afternoon, is not probably the best kind of leadership that one could show," Progressive Conservative Leader John Tory told The Canadian Press. I think, anyway - Tory's comment seems to be one of disparaging McGuinty's timing, trying to bury it on the weekend to soften the blow in the national media, which is fair. Just so long as the Ontario PC Party doesn't come up with the bright idea to court the sharia-supporting vote, next election, I'm satisfied...

Don't you know, everyone wants to laugh

2005-09-12T08:12:00.000-04:00

Interesting discovery of the day, found while Googling the phrase "Faulknerian idiot man-child": The Onion has reopened their archives - for the past several years, behind a subscription wall, in a not particularly well-thought-out business model - and they now go all the way back to 1996. Thus, it's kind of interesting to see again those headlines from the fabled End of History - especially prescient ones like this, or a pitch-perfect imitation of, say, natural disaster-related blame-and-ignorance panic here. Sure, The Onion isn't very amusing now - but it certainly had the potential to be, and that's a shame.