ColbyCosh.com

I'm sure it happens in other NHL cities that the team owner will occasionally send a heavy to threaten rights-holding broadcasters who get too frisky. I mean, I'd guess it must. But right out in the open like this? As if it never even occurred to them that it wasn't a totally cool thing to do? I mean... isn't this sort of thing normally handled like Capone did in The Untouchables, in a back room over balloons of Courvoisier?

My Friday column talks about a central Alberta farmer who is being prosecuted for collaring a thief by relatively safe means in a place where police response times are probably somewhere between 15 minutes and a half-hour. I accuse the RCMP of discouraging civilized deterrence (thieves were hanged in cold blood by our culture in the age of Johnson, Gibbon, and Burke; it can't be all that terrible to knock the odd one down with a high-speed cloud of lead bees), but it must be admitted that the deterrent effect of Brian Knight's actions might not be nearly so great if he hadn't received the publicity from being charged.

My short Walrus profile of new Alberta Liberal leader David Swann has found its way to the web. I didn't select the headline, but I like it!

You know about R. Crumb's eccentric siblings, but have you heard about his identical cousin?

Tuesday's column is a personal reflection on my complicated lifelong relationship with Apple—a relationship now transformed by my purchase of an iPod Touch. There's no National Post on Good Friday; try not to miss me too much.

At Full Comment, a short entry that does what it says on the tin: provides "a brief update on the Paul Band ecstasy mystery".

I haven't seen a robin yet in Edmonton, but these guys will do.

Check out this old entry and the attached comments, and tell me to my face that we didn't clearly predict the rise of the netbook one year before it happened. I almost shiver when I read "...the world may be ready for a computer that's halfway in size between PDA and laptop."

Aaand one more FC throwaway, with a couple of interesting links about crazy people.

Is there anything wrong with updating the rules of succession to the shared throne of the Commonwealth realms? Maybe not, I suggest in my Tuesday Post column, but there is a danger in letting British politicians treat those rules as a unique political preserve of Britain, alterable in an instant to suit the changing whims of the British people. (I'm happy with the column, but it's definitely one to file under "The sort of thing you will like, if you like that sort of thing.")

I always figured that a reasonably decent Fermian way to identify the most technologically advanced nation on Earth would be to find the one capable of manufacturing the fastest general-purpose camera lens. Until recently, I didn't know that for a couple of decades the answer to this puzzle was "Canada"—thanks to a genius named Walter Mandler. The Elcan (Ernst Leitz Canada) company in Midland, Ont., is now an independent contractor that concentrates on defence imaging, and it seems that Leica, always vaguely embarrassed about having the Noctilux assembled in Canada by relatives of Old Shatterhand, has repatriated production of the newest Noctilux lens (f/0.95!).

I got curious about Mark Fidrych overnight and ran off at the mouth to the tune of 900 words about the guy at Full Comment.

If your child is interested in music, suggest that he master one of those obscure instruments that orchestras occasionally like to lay on for the sake of authenticity. That way, as Doug Yeo's gallery of the serpent suggests, he'll always have work somewhere, he'll more or less automatically belong to a closeknit worldwide community of experts, and he'll be able to create his own little world of travelling and lectures.

In the battle between transsexuals and the Alberta government, who's right? Silly question, I say in today's Post column: they're both wrong, and the editors and columnists covering this story are the wrongest of all.

Mattress King is NOT one of those old-fashioned, harmless, namby-pamby small-business mascots. Mattress King is an ANGRY, CRUEL BASTARD. He has never met a man he couldn't kill dead with a sidelong sneer, and he refuses to treat women as objects because some objects are potentially useful. Ask him today about comfortable sleep options, and you will probably get raped to death by his personal hundred-man bodyguard (he calls them The Expendables). 20% off on Sertas and Sealys all this week.

I thought I could hold out longer before playing the cat card in print. Going from one signed column a week to two makes a man do unspeakable things.

Pat Quinn doesn't want to coach the Edmonton Oilers because... there's been a lot of turnover in Toronto?

Is Quinn waiting for a call here? Or is he going to make one himself? "You let things settle. I have great respect for coaches (like Craig MacTavish). The (NHL) coaching job, sometimes you wonder. Since I was let go in Toronto, there's been 20 coaching changes. Sometimes you think, 'What kind of job is that?'."

How this is relevant to the Oilers, who have pretty much had three real head coaches in three decades of life as an NHL franchise, and who gave MacT enough rope to hang himself and five other guys, is not quite clear to me. Is Quinn afraid of becoming the next George Burnett? Anyway, it sounds as though he has his eye on the Minnesota job, and I for one have a list of 28 other NHL cities in which I'd rather see the flyblown old fart established.

Elise Stolte and Laura Drake explain in the Edmonton Journal exactly what happened to a young lady at a party over the weekend:

An overdose of ecstasy Friday night shocked her small body so badly that her heart stopped beating in the middle of a West Edmonton Mall underage party.

As I've been trying to remind everyone, toxicology reports take 3-6 months in Alberta these days, but somehow the Edmonton Journal, in these hard times, is capable of staffing a newspaper with wizards who can perform remote precognitive autopsies. I just wonder how many more kids may have to die before someone other than me stops blurting out "overdose" and gets interested in the possibility of tainted or adulterated drugs in the local market.

[UPDATE: April 28: The Journal, to its credit, backs up and takes a more careful run at the issue today. Since I'm being criticized for being overpedantic here I will pass over the Zen koan about those "ecstasy tablets that contain no ecstasy whatsoever".]