An American correspondent to Virginia Postrel writes:

Years ago, I took a tour of the cathedral in Koln, Germany. The guide told us that the people of the city thought it was a miracle of God that the city had been bombed flat by the U.S. in WWII, but the cathedral survived untouched by the bombs. I later mentioned this to my father, who was a B-17 pilot in the war and had flown missions over Koln. He said God had nothing to do with it; every mission had been given specific orders to do whatever they could to avoid hitting the church, and they had followed orders.

This is the way the U.S. military has acted throughout history, and this is the same credit they've gotten. Nothing has changed.

Well, no, actually; that's the other thing--central Cologne was area-bombed by British aircraft in the original "thousand-bomber raid" on May 30, 1942. That's several months before American aircraft were even involved in strategic bombing in Europe, and it is unquestionably this raid which the tour guide would have been referring to when he or she spoke of a "miracle of God". And since nighttime area bombing was completely haphazard, the term is entirely apt, as least as a metaphor.

Of course it's nice to avoid bombing churches during the day, late in the war, when you have command of the skies; any aircraft passing over Cologne after May of '42 could hardly have missed the cathedral, the only large structure standing for miles around, if the bombardier cared to waste explosives on it. I don't suppose there's much point in quizzing Dad at one remove on what he bombed instead. At any rate, the days of dumb, brutal terror bombing of civilian populations are over, and bringing them up in the Iraq case only confuses the issue.

[UPDATE, March 1: In that last sentence I of course meant aerial terror bombing of civilian populations by professional air forces--the Oklahoma City/Bali kind will be with us for some time. Thanks to John for the e-mail.]

[UPDATE, March 2: Sam Mikes takes umbrage with my entry on the flattening of Cologne, though on frankly unclear grounds: he agrees that the cathedral's survival of British area bombing was "miraculous", and he agrees that targeting the cathedral during a daylight raid late in the war would have been a waste of explosives. What exactly doesn't he agree with? An imagined "implication" of one of my sentences? Mea maxima culpa, no doubt. He also suggests (implies?) that the loss of six bombers in a 1945 U.S. raid on Cologne was especially heavy. The British, let us recall, lost 43 (forty-three) planes in the May 1942 attack.]

[UPDATE, later on March 2: Sam's last word on the subject.]

J.P. Morgan Securities has downgraded Palm Inc.'s stock today from "neutral" to "underweight", it says here. Is it just me or is some of this business lingo awfully idiosyncratic? What comes after "underweight", "anorexic"? "BastarCo was downgraded from 'Whitney Houston' to 'Karen Carpenter' today on word of poor third-quarter revenues..."

Anyway, I'm here to testify that while the fact still brings me shame, my Palm is indispensable and has changed my life. As you can tell from my occasional hints of tax trouble and household slovenliness, I am an organizational retard. Partly, you know, this is cultivated habit. I can't clean a floor without realizing that I haven't read Lord Jim or The Anatomy of Melancholy yet, and the self-loathing begins. Then it continues while I'm reading the book and thinking about my messy floor. I can't really win, but when things get too desperate I can always use the Palm to assemble a strategy of attack against household detritus, neglected tasks at work, long-ignored responsibilities to creditors, or what have you. So in a lot of ways Palm Inc. has kept me from being committed or imprisoned--not to speak of their gizmo's value in remembering birthdays, storing phone numbers, allowing you to travel with a portable spreadsheet, etc. I used to use a paper daytimer, but guess what: us organizational retards tend to lose things, and you can't HotSync a Day Runner. The Palm is a piece of technology that has actually improved me slightly as a human being, and I speak as the furthest thing imaginable from a yuppie or a gadget freak.

Marc Weisblott, the man without permalinks, finally posted (2/25) the ugly, hidden truth about the tortuous career path of Great White guitarist Ty Longley (dec'd). I am at liberty to mention that it involved terribly sweaty cameramen and something called a "Granny Gangbang", but I don't want to ruin the ultimate surprise of Ty's nom de cum. Trust me, you'll giggle. The Weisblogg is full of good recent stuff. There's a bit (2/26) about the poor Ontarian high-schoolers who now have to head straight for college without attending Grade 13, as has been habitual until now.

For students such as Brooklyn Brownstone, who completes Grade 12 in June, the additional wait [to find out if she has been admitted to her college of choice] is making what she describes as "the most stressful year of my life" even tougher. "Every little piece of homework you do, you think, this could determine the rest of my life."

Like, ohmygod! Chin up, Miss Brownstone: you may find whizzing through high school in three years to be a baffling intellectual challenge, but Ontario's belated reform is one small step on the road to making your home province less of a national laughingstock. Besides, you still have Ontario's notorious secondary grade inflation helping you along your life path. Those cheap A's are the wind beneath your wings.

Weisblott lets us down a little in his rumination on high school reunions and West Coast punkettes the Donnas (2/27). "How do you know that recently mainstreamed girl group The Donnas are really the age they claim to be?" he asks. Why, what could be easier than consulting their secret prehistory as the Electrocutes? These girls certainly weren't very old when these pictures were taken, although they lack the outright jailbait-alert factor of Cherie Currie and the Runaways...

Go to Kevin Steel's weblog and scroll past the scowling convenience-store clerk for a marvelous stinging entry on the past and future of Canada's federal firearm registry.

(Via Robot Wisdom) The mathematically inclined minority of readers will not wish to miss T.L. Hankins' illustrated history of graphs. It provides many of those moments in which you discover, holy crapola, that a certain way of doing things actually has a history. We all know, at least in an implicit way, that Cartesian coordinates don't pre-date Descartes. But when did they make the leap from geometry to being used for organizing experimental observations?--if you can't answer that question, Hankins is your man.

Imagine doing any kind of quantitative science without the graphical representations of data we take for granted. Until the late eighteenth century, that is exactly what natural philosophers had to do. And once methods of graphing were developed--scatter plots, isometric lines--they started to fertilize the discovery of natural law at once:

For example, Gibbs began his work in thermodynamics with the stated purpose of creating a better graph. He thought graphically and sought a graphical solution to the problems of his science. The title of his first essay was "Graphical Methods in the Thermodynamics of Fluids"; the title of his second was "A Method of Geometrical Representation of the Thermodynamic Properties of Substances by Means of Surfaces." Gibbs made his purpose clear in the very first paragraph of the first paper: "The object of this article is to call attention to certain diagrams... which afford graphical methods co-extensive in their applications with that in ordinary use, and preferable to it in many cases in respect of distinctness or of convenience." Thus Gibbs saw his first task as making a better graph, which then allowed him to mathematize and transform the entire science of thermodynamics in a profound way.

Likewise, Dmitrii Mendeleev first created his periodic table because he was writing a textbook and needed a straightforward way to organize the disparate parts of chemistry for his students. In the process he saw that what began as a purely descriptive table would allow him to make important predictions about atomic weights and the existence of other undiscovered elements. In these cases graphs and tables revealed to their creators information that they had not anticipated.

There are also cases in which the lack of graphs made it difficult for mathematicians to see the implications of their data. Sandy Zabell has shown in analyzing the London Bills of Mortality that a simple plotting of the data would have revealed much information and a variety of errors that the early investigators could not see from the numbers alone. Robert Boyle was sufficiently confused by his data on the compression of air that he claimed, "[These difficulties] require more skill in mathematics than I pretend to. ...I was willing to refer the nicer considerations of this matter to some of our learned and accurate mathematicians, thinking it enough for me to have given the hint already suggested." A simple graph of his data would have revealed "Boyle's law" clearly and would have obviated the need for any more mathematics.

While I'm finishing up my now-much-too-late copy, you could read this Maclean's back-page column by L. Ian MacDonald, which is presciently tailored to the occasion of Carolyn Parrish's "gaffe". The column exhibits the central Canadian media's unfortunate tendency to solicit opinion from gray-suited baby-boom ex-bureaucrats, and MacDonald says "sensibilities" where he pretty clearly means "sensitivities", but otherwise it's a helpful critique of anti-Americanism--one that is, at the same time, unsparing of the U.S. government's errors in dealing with its neighbour.

Canadians don't get it because they would rather have a debate about the root cause of terrorism than do anything about it. They would rather view the world in terms of moral equivalency between George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein. This is a country, after all, where a pre-Christmas poll found that 38 per cent of Canadians thought Dubya was a bigger threat to world peace than Saddam. When the Prime Minister's communications director carelessly let slip that the President of the United States was "a moron," far too many Canadians agreed with her. As if, as a matter of routine, Harvard gives out M.B.A. degrees to morons.

And Canadians don't get it because even as we live under the protection of the American shield, and live off the profits of our trade with them, we resent Americans. We see ourselves as the "kinder, gentler" place of which the first George Bush spoke. A nation of peacekeepers--but we don't even do as much of that anymore. The impoverished nation of Bangladesh leads the world in peacekeeping, while Canada's contribution has slipped to 34th place. The Prime Minister keeps icing the puck on Iraq, hoping the UN will pass a second resolution authorizing force before the U.S. goes in on its own. And then what?

B.E. Williams, last surviving soldier of New Zealand in the Great War, died February 13 at the age of 105. The late Mr. Williams was wounded at Passchendaele, perhaps the craziest battle of a crazily conducted war, but lived to see eighty-five and a half more years. Dr. Arthur Bennett "Bozo" Manson is said to have died in Vancouver this month, leaving an estimated eleven surviving members of the Canadian Expeditionary Force.

Hi there. I've been pulling an allnighter on my day job, filing a fun-filled installment of my column, and I'm taking a short break. I had better weblog, because if I lie down for a nap at this stage, I will never, ever wake up again. A lot of people tell me they find allnighters harder as they grow older. I am not yet having this problem: years of self-maltreatment have acclimated me to punishing deadlines once every two weeks. The problem I'm having is that the catnaps I use to indulge in no longer seem practical. I can sleep, easily, through the quiet but piercing alarm on my Palm Pilot; I can certainly sleep through the electronically blaring alarm on my Nokia cell phone; and as loud as I care to turn up my clock radio, I can sleep through that, too, even if it's tuned to static. Or CBC morning programming--not sure which is more grating.

Mr. Rogers has died of cancer, and I find it curiously poignant that the "family spokesman" is David "Mr. McFeely" Newell, the postman from the show. If you have even one co-worker who remains a close enough friend to field media inquiries when you die, you've definitely succeeded in some basic ways as a human being. Fred Rogers was chiefly notable in Canada for being so gentle and polite on-air that Canadians tended to assume he was Canadian--I think there was a lot of subconscious confusion about his status, owing to his utter lack of aggression. "Wait--he was Canadian, wasn't he? Or was he?" Mr. Rogers actually came from Pennsylvania coal country originally, but the Canadians were the first ones to put him on the air as a host. Kind of an honourary Canadian, as I'm sure some enterprising columnist or other will point out.

A Canadian MP (Liberal, of course) has had to apologize for making a "gaffe". You remember Michael Kinsley's definition of that word, don't you? It's when a politician accidentally tells the truth.

OTTAWA (CP) - A Liberal MP quickly apologized Wednesday after making an offensive offhand remark about the United States. Carolyn Parrish was walking away from reporters after expressing frustration about the likelihood of war in Iraq when she said in mock exasperation: "Damn Americans, I hate the bastards." The remark was picked up by a TV microphone and Parrish issued an apology a few hours later. "I deeply regret the comments that I made today in the heat of the moment, in a private conversation," she said in a statement. "My comments do not reflect my personal opinion of the American people and they certainly do not reflect the views of the government of Canada."

It's the Possession Defence! My comments only reflect the views of the aliens controlling my brain! Some Canadian criminal defendants have successfully cleared themselves by arguing in court that they had quaffed themselves into a "robotic state"; was Ms. Parrish, as the phrase goes up here, "robo-drunk"? The voters want to know! Watch for the "Damn Americans, I Hate Those Bastards" T-shirt, coming soon to a CafeShop near you.

New York Times headline: Bush Says Ousting Hussein Can Bring Peace to Mideast. However, I initially read this as "Bush Says Outing Hussein Can Bring Peace to Mideast". For a sec there, I was all, "Oh man, that explains the moustache." Does the Republican Guard have gaydar-jamming capability?

Kathryn J. Lopez in The Corner: "Mike Farrell, formerly from MASH, is on Crossfire wearing DUCT tape on his lapel. I assume, obviously, it is some kind of antiwar statement. But what exactly is it supposed to say?" Obviously Kathryn hasn't really noticed, I mean really noticed, the cool, irreproducible silvery colour of duct tape. B.J. Hunnicutt isn't making an antiwar statement--he's making a fashion statement! Didn't someone just say "Duct tape is the new black"?

By the way, I love how B.J. is, like, subliminally pulling rank on America by going on Crossfire. We'd better pay attention to his leftist nonsense because he spent seven years sewing all those kids back together in Korea, dammit. I think it's time, though, that his agent told him how everybody wanted Trapper John to come back in the worst way.

John Ellis is retiring his weblog. His last reported weight was 225 pounds, a very creditable 11 off his peak, as I recall. Unfortunately he reached this figure on January 29 and never again said a word on the subject. His departure leaves us to speculate that he broke down under the psychological pressure of February and had a Meredith Baxter Birney-style midnight freakout in the kitchen with a Sara Lee cake.

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Pioneer 10, the first spacecraft to venture out of the solar system, has fallen silent after traveling billions of miles from Earth on a mission that has lasted nearly 31 years, NASA said Tuesday.

What was apparently the spacecraft's last signal was received January 22 by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Deep Space Network. At the time, Pioneer 10 was 7.6 billion miles from Earth; the signal, traveling at the speed of light, took 11 hours and 20 minutes to arrive.

CNN has the full story. I realize Pioneer's signal has faded just about when it was expected to, but is anybody else thinking that this looks disturbingly like the prologue to one of those movies where the Earth gets overrun by scaly, tentacled space warriors? CUE LONG SHOT OF PIONEER FLYING THROUGH SPACE - ZOOM IN - HOLD CLOSEUP - SUDDENLY, FROM OUT OF FRAME, GIANT METALLIC HAND APPEARS AND CRUSHES PIONEER LIKE A BEER CAN - ZOOM OUT - PAN - ZOOM IN ON EARTH, LOOKING GEMLIKE AND DEFENCELESS AGAINST THE VOID - CUE OMINOUS MUSIC - ROLL OPENING CREDITS

I can't go along with the outrage, I'm afraid, over CBS's allowing Saddam Hussein to pre-approve the broadcast version of Dan Rather's interview. Presumably this was a precondition of their sitdown: anyone, from the lowliest private citizen to the most powerful dictator, is perfectly entitled to cut such a deal in advance of an interview. (This is rarely done, of course, but that's for practical reasons rather than ethical ones.) And the network, of course, is entitled to deep-six the footage if they find it's been doctored, fudged, or edited to such a degree that it would become an empty propaganda instrument. Since CBS has the fallback position of throwing away the interview altogether, they can't really be said to be knuckling under to enemy "censorship". Any off-the-cuff comments Saddam might have made can be reported credibly, even if they are edited out of the footage at the request of the Iraqi censors. Rather will presumably be giving us his own gloss on the tête-à-tête anyhow.

I'm afraid I just don't see the big deal--Saddam's ordinary public statements are so batshit crazy it's hard to imagine his handpicked personnel combing over the interview and going "Whoa, Jesus, we can't let the Big Guy say that on Great Satan Television." Does this guy really have anything left to lose? What new part of the American public can conceivably be alienated from Saddam? What's he going to do, accidentally let slip that some of his best friends are Jews? Admit that he finds Noam Chomsky "reactionary and indecipherable"? I don't really see the problem here. We know what the interview's going to be: a perfunctory recitation of Saddam's grievances, pan-Arabist fantasies, and standard-issue threats to drown the American pigpeople in their own blood. Snore.

Steven Jens of Boston fears my tangential reference to the Cocoanut Grove fire may be lost on non-locals. A sad thought, that such a notable part of the American mythos might have been lost to time. This page has a good short account of the fire, which killed cowboy actor Buck Jones and 491 others. Note to Google searchers and copy editors: it's "Cocoanut", dammit, "Cocoanut".

When I come to power, do-gooder politicians will be the first people put to the sword. But perhaps I'm being unfair to MLA Barry McFarland, who is agitating to raise Alberta's school-leaving age to 17. After all, to be a do-gooder you must wish to do only good, and McFarland is quietly baiting a major religious minority as well as grasping for laurels from the shit-thick.

Barry McFarland introduced a private member's bill Monday "to bring us into the 21st century" by raising the dropout age from 16 to 17. ...Bill 203, the School (Compulsory Attendance) Amendment Act, would require teens to stay in school until at least Grade 11, or sometimes Grade 12. It would not apply to gifted children who finish high school early or students who leave because of mental or physical disabilities.

The southern Alberta Tory MLA said he also hopes his legislation will ensure more Hutterite children stay in school past age 15. "They're going to be responsible for food safety. Does anyone relish the thought of somebody with Grade 7 education in today's society reading a label about a chemical? And it begs the question, 'What could that potentially do for the food chain?' I don't think religious grounds should be reason to discontinue your education." Although it isn't a specific part of the bill, McFarland would like to see accompanying regulations state that children cannot be exempted for religious grounds.

I had hoped the 21st century would prove to be the one where we stopped passing wasteful, bullying laws with the aim of improving people against their will. Not that things have gone very well so far: the Alberta government's anti-smoking jihad has shown exactly what they think about the sovereign individual's responsibility for his own body and affairs. But what person with the neuronal capacity of a flatworm still shares McFarland's casual confidence that desirable social changes can be brought about with a stroke of a legislator's pen? What, precisely, is "21st-century" about trying to coerce people into loving school--about imprisoning a whole population for an extra year of their lives? This is not only cretinism (does the member really think public schools impart expert knowledge about industrial chemicals to children between the ages of 15 and 17?), it is venomous cretinism.

If people really need to complete Grade 11 to have a decent life, surely they will go back for their high-school equivalency after a few years of languishing in the workforce, or the gutter, as the case may be. As it happens, in the real world you can train for a lot of jobs without finishing Grade 11--but perhaps McFarland doesn't think Alberta needs bakers, janitors, hairdressers, or garbagemen. Pshaw! Those occupations are so... twentieth-century, dontcha know.

You know somebody screwed up bad when Gene Simmons is being interviewed as the voice of sweet reason. Here's Paul Stanley's take on pyrotechnic displays at concerts, and I know you were waiting with bated breath for this:

You have to be extremely careful with anything that has to do with fire.

I suspect Kiss's ox-sized commercial hearts are ticking along a little faster than usual this week. After the Great White fire, promoters and venues are going to be very reluctant to trust anyone with pyro unless they have a reputation for professionalism and a long track record in the business. The market price of a ticket to see Kiss--and a very few other touring metalloid dinosaurs still playing the big venues--just went up a little, borne aloft by the flames in West Warwick.

I've always come to venues with the question "What if there's a fire?" in mind. Chalk it up to a morbid fascination with disasters like the Cocoanut Grove. It was unlikely that very many more people at the Station could have been saved once the soundproofing started to go up, but it's worth bearing in mind the old lessons, anyway. Your chances of survival in a building fire are enhanced if you know to look for the second most obvious exit; in a free-for-all, trampling will kill you just as thoroughly as heat or smoke, and you've got to suppress the instinct to just turn and run 180 degrees from the line between you and the open flame. Chance, they say, favours the prepared mind.

(Via BoingBoing) Holy lord in Heaven. It's the TVOntario Childrens Shows of the 1970's Tribute Page! Now, of course, I didn't grow up in Ontario, but one way or another all these programs made their way onto early-morning TV screens (or into classrooms) out here, so I can whistle, hum, or sing the theme songs to at least seven of the 11 shows depicted on the main page. Tribute pages include one for the baffling European stop-motion cartoon Canadians called "Jeremy" (to qualify as a member of my generation you must be able to sing not only the "Jeremy" theme but also the dirge-like minor-key version which would play whenever Jeremy shed tears) and the completely horrifying and confusing "Timothy Pilgrim", which gave future Degrassi fans a first sickening glimpse of Ontario's gray, decaying, industrially poisoned side. I've got no comment whatsoever on the whole creepy catamite-recruitment aspect of that show. There's also Parlez-Moi, which simultaneously taught English Canadian children (a) French and (b) to hate the French. Unfortunately these pages contain only a few stills and some minimal information about each show. There is a link to a page of theme song MP3s, though. Canadian indie groups looking to earn some cheap applause, take note (sorry: no tablature).

Did I tell you I watched that "Are You Hot?" show? It was playing in the bar at Chili's on Thursday night. Heather Havrilesky disapproved of the whole darn thing quite apocalyptically in Salon: "...by the end of the show, darkness sets in, and what initially seemed like a dirty good time now seems not just cruel and shallow and sick but downright disturbing, a scary reflection of the times and possibly even a bad omen...". It would be hard to dispute that "Are You Hot?" adds a whole new Max Hardcore dimension to TV, with Lorenzo Lamas exploring the phallic/sadistic possibilities of the laser pointer (who knew we were going to be able to use "transgressive" and "Lorenzo Lamas" in the same sentence in the year 2003?), but didn't I hear that some network or other already has "Who Wants to Marry Their Own Mother" in the works? Doesn't "Fear Factor" feature a regular anal fisting segment by now? I mean, by all means let's panic about the decline of civilization; I'm just surprised some folks are so late getting the memo.

Kidnapped from the weblog by books again, this time the second Sword of Honour book--Officers and Gentlemen--and Claudius the God by Robert Graves. Often when you are reading two books, or series of books, at the same time, you notice curious parallels between them. Well, I suppose they aren't very curious in the case of the Claudius books and Sword of Honour, written by men of the same country and the same generation, and in response to the same phenomenon--Ortega's "revolt of the masses", and the rapid mutation of standards of virtue which follows as a consequence. Graves' Claudius and Waugh's Crouchback each find, in their respective times, that nobility has been superannuated, and that they have failed to adapt. They find themselves in worlds--those of 54 and 1941 A.D.--where "all gentlemen are now very old", as one of Waugh's characters observes. Exactly the kind of grim fare I shouldn't be consuming in February.

My chart of HSX-generated Oscar odds has been updated. (For background on the chart, see this entry.) In the past nine days the big movers have been:

UP
· Scorsese (Gangs of New York) for Best Director, +23%
· Kidman (The Hours) for Best Actress, +21%
· Chicago for Best Picture, +21%

DOWN
· Rob Marshall (Chicago) for Best Director, -26%
· Lilo & Stitch for Best Animated Feature, -25%
· The Hours for Best Picture, -24%

HSX traders consider the strongest mortal locks on the market to be Chicago for Picture (67%), Scorsese (64%), Kidman (61%), and Fat Greek Wedding for Original Screenplay (58%). My dark-horse pick, Salma Hayek, is currently available at a steal for $1.49 (remember, return on investment is $25/share in the event of a win).

Sarah says she's baffled that I didn't pick Nicole Kidman to win Best Actress. Playing a crazy person is a big advantage, but it was a very bad sign for Kidman when she didn't win last year for Moulin Rouge. Let's review the factors she had working for her--the movie was a groundbreaking hit, she carried it single-handed, she sang, and she should have had strong public sympathy working in her favour right after the hideous divorce. Somehow it didn't add up to victory, even though there was no strong sympathy candidate in the race. If you're a bettor, this should all be a warning for 2003. I don't want to indulge in conspiracy theory or anything, but the Scientologists have a lot of pull in Hollywood, and her defiant refusal to convert throughout her marriage (she prefers to remain a semi-lapsed Catholic, in accordance with her upbringing) may have ticked off the wrong people. Just a thought.

That McDonald's lawsuit: Rangel, M.D., does the math. And don't miss his provisional nostra culpa (sort of) for AIDS in Africa.

Many of you have probably already seen the value-added version of the Talking Dog's blogroll. It's a good, if slightly ass-kissy, first draft for a future Encyclopedia Blogospherica. Full disclosure: mine is one of the asses.

Colby Cosh of Edmonton brings us the "Golden Treasury of Colby Coshery"--wit, Canadian and international politics, Canadian football, goings on in the life of Colby Cosh... just... great... stuff... all... the... time... damnit!
TalkingDog Designation: Eskimo Dog (or Husky)

There's more from Sunday's Edmonton Journal, and this time it's not so creditable, unless you happen to approve of the racism of soft expectations. Renata D'Aliesio profiles a family of Indian origin annoyed by changes to U.S. border-crossing rules which will require Canadian landed immigrants from certain countries to apply for a special visa to obtain southward passage. I'll give you this excerpt before I link to the story:

While Arun Patel and his two sons are Canadian citizens, his wife, Manjula, is a landed immigrant from India. Because she's from a Commonwealth country, the 53-year-old has been allowed to cross the border as freely as her family.

That freedom, however, will be taken from her and many other immigrants on March 17, when the U.S. will require them to travel to its consulate to apply for a non-immigrant visa in person instead of by mail. The approval process could take up to 60 days.

Manjula is lucky. She's from Edmonton and is just a three-hour drive from the U.S. consulate in Calgary, the only one that handles visa requests from Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and the Northwest Territories. Others will have to travel thousands of kilometres at their own expense if they want a visa to visit the U.S.

"We're a neighbour and a good friend. Why are they doing this?" Manjula's husband asked Saturday. "India is a Commonwealth country but they are not treating us the same as other Commonwealth countries."

A highly lyrical paean to "lost freedom", this, but the alert reader will have noticed in the lede of the full story that Manjula Patel has lived in Canada for twenty-eight (28) years without troubling herself to obtain Canadian citizenship. Did anyone on the Journal rim think to ask why no explanation is supplied? If flitting back and forth across international borders was singularly important to your lifestyle, don't you think--given 28 years to mull the matter over--that you might want to make your passport match your country of permanent residence?

But ascertaining an answer to that question might have clouded the necessary atmosphere of sanctimony. No offense to Ms. D'Aliesio is meant: the journalistic rule that immigrants must be treated as symbols rather than human beings is very nearly absolute, and she is probably in no position to defy it.

Thanks to Instapundit for the traffic. Not that it makes any real difference, but I've been at the house cleaning, working, and handling minor crises for most of the weekend, so the professor has actually provided a sort of relief from cabin fever, the usual array of personal troubles, and the subliminal added sorrow of declining visitor levels. The furnace quit again last night but I find I have no desire to wax comic about it. Perhaps this time it will run for longer than three weeks without needing a new part--or perhaps each new part puts mysterious engineering stresses on the old ones, and I am destined to have a new furnace installed piece by piece. I can't help suspecting that I (and by extension my landlord) have been a victim of professional extortion, or incompetence, but I can't demonstrate or test the suspicion, and when I'm reimbursed for this repair it won't really be my problem anymore.

Funny thing--Weisblott told me I'd get "hate mail" for my Iraq post. I never get hate mail, and I told him as much, and besides, I wasn't so much taking a position as I was sort of saying "My bwain hurts" in a Mr. Gumby accent. Then I got this actually rather awesome e-mail from one Chuck Herrick:

Some people can write an awful lot about a very simple subject, trying to find a conclusion.
I simply close my eyes and remember the picture of those two people jumping from the WTC, holding hands on the way down, so they could die when they hit the ground instead of dying while burning alive.
And, in about 1/2 a second, I'm ready for the War with Iraq... and with Iran and with North Korea and with Syria and with Libya, until we're done with the culture that did this to us.
Have a nice day, but don't take too long. Todd Beamer didn't have the luxury of writing a several page screed, and frankly neither do the rest of us, even if like you, we still suffer from that illusion. [Er... what illusion exactly did you mean? -ed.]

The Sunday Edmonton Journal has an interesting and fresh tale of 19th-century Arctic exploration. "We are not stating that all of the expedition members or any specific persons were involved in cannibalism..." Now there's a pull-quote if ever I saw one.

In the world of flesh and bone, the world offline, people keep making inappropriate assumptions about how I stand on the Possibly Upcoming War Of The U.S. And Others Against Iraq. It's not anyone's fault but mine, since I've avoided categorical statements about the war. Antiwar friends assume me to have a "kill them all, God will know his own"-type position, and militarist friends think I will enjoy picking apart, or simply pointing and laughing at, arguments against the war. I do enjoy it, sometimes. There is a sense of satisfaction in finding the weak premise in an otherwise convincing case. There isn't much, on the whole, in defecating on pacifism, or on the far more abundant alternative: namely, disingenuous rhetorical misdirections designed to advance a pacifist agenda. Pacifists are self-discrediting and I wish they could simply be marginalized by the common consent of mankind, as Nazis now are. Whenever I engage somebody who obviously really believes that all war is ipso facto morally wrong, but chooses instead to nitpick about oil companies and Kurds, I feel implicated in their dishonesty.

The first question to answer in setting out a position on the war is this: What kind of war is justified? And unfortunately the to-and-fro of the past year has revealed a certain poverty in all categorical answers to this question. The old just-war doctrines of the Christian church used to have a certain appeal to me, in their seductive logicalness. The 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia teaches:

The primary title of a state to go to war is: first, the fact that the state's right[s] (either directly or indirectly through those of its citizens) are menaced by foreign aggression not otherwise to be prevented than by war; secondly, the fact of actual violation of right not otherwise reparable; thirdly, the need of punishing the threatening or infringing power for the security of the future.

There is much to admire in this little sentence, not least in how it foretold the concerns around which our present-day war debate would revolve. Yet what universally satisfying standard of "menace" can be framed? And what transnational doctrinal authority in morals now exists to say whether the standard has been met? I'm not content to refer such questions to the UN, that Hydra of socialistic folderol, as a final arbiter. And neither is anybody else, really. If Vanuatu had the military might of the United States, its relations with the UN would be just as tumultuous as the U.S.'s are now. I am unwilling to say that America is wrong only because she is strong.

Simply put, pre-emptive war is obviously justified under certain conditions of "menace". And in 1911 there was really little ambiguity about this concept. It was well understood then that a general infantry mobilization on the part of a neighbouring state was the activating casus belli, so much so that war broke out three years later, against the wishes of nearly all European statesmen, simply because mobilization had its own remorseless logic. We think of the Great War as a puzzling, demented thing, but locating a specific point at which anyone in authority might have acted differently has proven very difficult indeed, despite 85 years of questing. Thousands of historians have given their lives to the search without establishing the ghost of a consensus on the matter.

Now "menace" has necessarily become a matter of--what? Vials? Barrels of chemicals? A few kilos of uranium? We no longer have the luxury, certainly, of waiting for hussars to mass on the border. And so we plunge into the dilemma thus presented. The means of warfare involving mass destruction are largely uncontrolled and, in principle, impossible to detect without the permission of the state in question. ("Weapons inspectors" are a sham designed to shore up the perception that there remains an enforceable standard of "menace" under the old Christian rule.) Thus are we forced to choose between unpalatable policies. One is to constantly X-ray the hearts of other heads of sovereign governments for signs of generalized dodginess, and to behave imperially--and, sub specie aeternitatis, somewhat randomly. Under this policy you will certainly be wrong about what your enemies are up to sometimes, and the innocent will die for no reason at all. The alternative is to await an actual act of war--one which may, in fact, destroy your society altogether--and hope you may identify the perpetrator after the fact, and be able to do something about it, which you probably won't.

The situation, it seems to me, is that any state claiming the hypothetical right to act militarily faces a choice between two equally unacceptable principles of conduct. In a certain way, this makes the whole war/antiwar debate stupid; it makes it stupid for us to think that the American authorities are going to let their actions be determined by considerations of domestic politics, anyway. President Bush has said, more or less, that he wakes up every morning waiting for news of a second, and worse, 9/11--for the real 9/11, so to speak. You can assemble all the protestors you like, but in the end he's got the responsibility and the power. He isn't listening to you (or to me), and most probably, he shouldn't.

I mean, what I really find myself thinking about the war debate lately is: I don't give a crap. Invade Iraq, don't invade Iraq... why, exactly, was I supposed to care again? Right: because...

· if the U.S. invades Iraq, it will usher in (or perhaps merely signify) a new era of sanguinary imperialism and trample the last remnants of the old Republic.
· if the U.S. does not invade Iraq, we may awaken one morning to find some American city quarantined by the National Guard, with communications cut off and rumours of bulldozers pushing dead bodies by the thousands into shallow trenches...

And boy, that will certainly be healthy for American liberty, won't it, folks? Perhaps you're not convinced that Iraq is really a threat to the United States. With apologies to Colin Powell, I'm not entirely convinced either. But let us say the unsaid: the alternative to invading Iraq is, now, going home and issuing an unspoken apology to Saddam for mussing up his porch. Does this really seem like a wholly good idea? One must, I think, dislike America greatly not to be somewhat sickened by the prospect. It makes me suspicious--since I favour America very strongly on non-political grounds as well as political ones--when people denounce the war, as they nearly all do, without expressing an awareness of the absurdity of bringing home those 150,000 troops, the real blow, like it or not, to American prestige. It is not a mere question of "face" or of honour, though James Bowman has discussed the war supportively in those terms, and others challenge the war effort in the same terms. It is a question of setting out firmly on a policy of non-pre-emption; of limiting the executive branch's power to make war on secret pretexts, which may sometimes be necessary in the new order; and of creating a practical incentive for foreign governments to act as bad as imaginable towards their own citizens and to use delay, bluster, and the leverage of pacifist sympathy amongst American citizens to weaken America's will.

Do we really want Saddam to win this one? There might be a certain grandeur in the withdrawal of the Rumsfeld-Cheney army, but even if Saddam cannot hurt the United States, letting him off the hook delays the essential issue, probably to the disadvantage of America. Someday there really will, as a matter of certainty, come an 'X' such that if the U.S. does not invade 'X' pre-emptively, Americans on American soil will suffer. Is Iraq 'X'? I don't know. But maybe Iraq must bleed now so that 'X' can be struck at when the time comes. Or, by the same token, maybe President Bush is using up the treasury of goodwill upon which his successors will have to draw, and invading Iraq will be a terrible mistake which makes it practically impossible to proceed against 'X'. Again, here is an argument I would respect if I ever heard it from the antiwar side.

My bedrock sympathies are all with those who would like America to return to a state of republican innocence and seriously non-interventionist foreign policy, of the sort, ladies and gentlemen, which George Washington did prescribe in perfectly clear English, however much you may like to pretend he didn't. If you desire war in Iraq, be bold: come forth and trample the memory of the Father of Your Country visibly--the antiwar zealots, after all, are not shy in their willingness to burn the flag, and you owe it to yourselves to outface them in honesty. To some degree, Washington's loathing of "foreign entanglements" truly is impractical now; on 9/11 we saw that foreigners have the power and the will to "entangle" America on no reasonable pretext at all. But 9/11 followed a century of broken faith with Washingtonian principles, and very few Americans have made it known that they regret the loss.

As much as most Americans, I hate to imagine the United States self-neutered and waiting for some enterprising jihadi to spread smallpox around. I love the United States--I love the United States in a way actual Americans cannot hope to comprehend. However, the best, firmest reason for this love is that the United States has hitherto never had to act in the role which now seems to be prescribed for it by the unpleasant alternative to defencelessness and prostration. If the U.S. is going to commit itself to a regime of permanent warfare, with the necessary violence to its republican Constitution, and with the necessary frightfulness which some casual proponents of pre-emptive brutishness have clearly not yet come close to imagining, then what will be left of that love? I think it will be--I sense it is becoming--the sort of subjective self-serving preference that Gallo-Romans and other half-Romanized subject peoples had for the Empire. I don't mean to trivialize when I say that when the admirable American political arrangements have become a dim historical memory, as to some degree they already have, America will still be the country that gave us baseball, jazz, ice cream cones, Google, and Playboy. For a very long time, through the mighty inertial forces set in motion by 19th- and 20th-century capitalism, it will continue to give us those things. My taste does not run to the muezzin and the prayer-mat, and that is a taste I am weak enough to wish others to kill for.

It is unattractive for the United States to embrace imperialism openly, but the alternative is to have the problems of imperialism dealt with clumsily. For other countries, Bush has already blurted out the choice: "Are you with us, or against us?" If we aren't above-board and sensible about all this, we will never be able to prolong the doom of domestic constitutional law, full personal liberty, and citizen participation in government. American adventurism must be the ruin of America, in the long run; the question is how long the run will be. Our task, as Americans or as allies, is to live with the tension for as long as possible. It may be cynical for you and I to say we want America and its close friends to be happy, peaceful, and prosperous at the expense of having the rest of the world live on continual probation, under continual threat of American military action. I think that if this is really what we want, we shouldn't be afraid to come out and say it, anyway. Countries like Canada are America's friends, so let's ingratiate ourselves with the hegemon and determine to establish our posterity in the part of the world that doesn't have to live in a state of half-terror because of its backwardness. It is better for us to be savage and safe than to be pious and dead.

For Americans to preserve this fruitful arrangement will require statesmen of genius, occasional rehabilitators of American freedom and of America's reputation; it will also require a conscious, continual, part-hypocritical rededication to the old republican forms, although, of course, the Roman fear of a king did not keep them from getting an imperator. Personality cults must be rejected; it would be useful, for a start, if journalists and citizens who belabour the charisma of people like Bill Clinton were regarded as enemies of the world's peace, and treated with due contempt, perhaps even a modest amount of cruelty. Clinton was no Caligula, but he's as close as the United States has come, so please, don't let's risk electing a real one. Sycophantic journalist-courtesans--I need hardly name names--are not very amusing or cute, under the circumstances.

Yesterday Mike Sugimoto declared Google News the "world's greatest news aggregator." It's hard to argue: the thing's still in beta, whatever that really means, and it's already become a near-essential tool for me and, I'm sure, for many others. But Google News is also a case study in how high Google has raised expectations for itself. After a positively trivial amount of time, I find myself becoming frustrated with the lack of refinement in the categories on offer. A mere eight--Top Stories, World, U.S., Business, Sci/Tech, Sports, Entertainment, Health. It's a good selection, and the Google WorldBrain usually puts articles in the right bin, but can't it subdivide any further? I might like Entertainment to be broken down into Movies, Music, Television, what have you--not that the lines between these categories are any too clear in the real world (is Jennifer Lopez "Movies" or "Music"?). And if the WorldBrain can identify a uniquely "U.S." news story, how about adding some other countries to the mix? Does Google have problems telling Austria and Australia apart?

You see how petty having the world at your fingertips makes you. Anyway, perhaps we should take this "beta" designation seriously. The Entertainment page, as I write this, contains the headline "Rapper pleads guilty to battery." Nothing wrong there, except that alongside the headline is a photo of David Hasselhoff. And if you're like me you'll just have spent a microscopic eternity imagining David Hasselhoff... rapping. While beating someone up. Yes, thanks very much, Google News, you've helped me reach my monthly quota of surrealistic nightmares a little early, and now I can sleep in peace.

Good to see Drudge breaking a story, I suppose, but it's a bit of a damp squib. Organizers of Sunday's Grammy Awards ("Grammys"? "Grammies"?) are concerned that some overwrought, ignorant recording artist or other might seize the opportunity to make a dramatic, inappropriate gesture against Gulf War II: The Never-Ending Pain in The Ass.

Word has reached network suites how one star is allegedly planning a dramatic anti-war gesture.
"I would hope the artists will remember they are on stage because of their music," a top CBS source told the Drudge Report [de-emphasis mine.- ed.] Friday morning.
During this week's BRITS award show, Coldplay's Chris Martin yelled out to the audience: "We are all going to die when George Bush has his way. But at least we are going to go out with a bang."

Drudge also reports that the Russian government shut down an opposition newspaper for criticizing the nation's Dear Leader. Isn't it nice to know that even though the world has gone mad, some things will never change?

To be perfectly candid, the thing that really bothers me about the death of all those Great White fans is that it provides Michael Jackson's defenders with a fresh debating strategy. "Sure... maybe he touched some kids' peckers. But did he ever burn 95 people to death? Huh? I guess this really puts the so-called crime of hiring a bad plastic surgeon in perspective, doesn't it?"

I regret to say that the guestbook at TyLongley.com, home of the "missing" Great White guitarist--he's presumably missing everything but his charred skeleton right about now--has been reset and cleansed of inappropriate comments. As is usual on such occasions, the cybermourners were beset by a few determined, callous jokesters, like the guy who offered to audition for Ty's spot in the lineup. (Careful what you wish for, Captain Comedy--depending on how the evidence goes, the band may not be playing anything but Johnny Cash's old prison venues from here on out.) But the real hilarity, according to the old law of life, came from the non-ironic well-wishers--like the lady who intends to name her next child "Ty Longley" even if it's a girl, or the guy who professed his confidence that Ty is "rockin' with the Master in Hell" even as we speak and signed off with a brawny "Ave Satani!". The spirit of metal never dies, even if guitarists touring with overenthusiastic stage techs sometimes do.

It's exhilarating to see somebody puncturing stupid, insane crowd estimates that police and protest organizers provide to a gullible press. The use of aerial photography and computers to count placard-waving imbeciles won't stop networks and newspapers from making frankly preposterous claims like the one I kept hearing last Sunday--that "a million people had flooded central London" to send the no-blood-for-oil message. A million people, huh? Does anybody really know what a million people would look like? The police have methods for guessing the size of a crowd, but they're based on nothing more than--you got it; earlier guesses.

San Francisco's deputy chief of police was shocked to hear that he had overestimated the size of the SF crowd by a factor of three.

Greg Suhr... said of The Chronicle's estimate, "I can tell you for a fact that's an enormously low number. (Pacific Bell Park), just in the stands, holds 40,000. The crowd at Pac Bell would pale in comparison to the crowd on Sunday."

Deputy Dawg might want to lie down with a cold cloth over his head and realize you can't compare the density of a seated stadium crowd to a disorganized mob of protestors. They're not remotely the same thing--he might as well be comparing the protest to the number of apples in an orchard or jellybeans in a jar. No doubt we will hear much stronger criticisms of the Chronicle-funded aerial survey, but now we have a method that can be checked and refined. That puts the whole thing on a scientific footing for the first time. Until the new method is more widely adopted, we must continue to treat crowd-size estimates appearing in the press as being much less credible than the astrology column.

A while ago Matt Welch needled me for daring to suggest that he lived in genteel freelance poverty on the Left Coast, but I have my revenge. He has, it seems, only now attained my own station in life--namely, resident of a former drug den.

At least that's what I'm told. One time I was taking a taxi home from the office and when I gave the guy the address he said "Hey, I know that block, there used to be a real notorious crack house there." I asked him to point it out to me when we got close to home. You can imagine my infinite horror/mirth when he stretched out his finger right toward my doorstep. The place actually seemed pretty well-kept when I moved in (don't even ask about its current condition), so maybe it was kind of a genteel, middle-class crack house. Fortunately I've never had any visits from ex-customers.

A first response to my inquiry about Second World War lit. Billy Beck breaks off from annotating Bukharin to recommend, by e-mail...

...Song of the Young Sentry, by David Westheimer (1968). Westheimer is probably best known--to the extent that he actually is known--for Von Ryan's Express and My Sweet Charlie, but Sentry tapped a tale far deeper than a glance at its POW camp setting might suggest. Surviving the shoot-down of his B-24, Steve Lang finds out that there is a lot of growing up left to do when the Eyeties get their hands on him. His war is over, but the fight's just begun. He wins, in the end. It's a damned good story.

It's Korea, not WW II, but I always heartily recommend James Salter's The Hunters (1956). This novel was made into a shitty movie starring Robert Mitchum and Robert Wagner, which it didn't deserve, because the film only actually touched an infinitesimal percentage of Salter's effort in the book. We're talking jet combat, but nothing like Tom Clancy or his strain. This is not some proto-techno-thriller. It's a personality drama set at a unique moment of history, when men played in a brand new arena for the first time. Some were better than others, for varying reasons, at different things and in different ways. And the thing burns down to the question of what's really important in a scene like that.

...For my money, Salter puts Hemingway in the deep shade when it comes to the sheer technical stroke. He never thought so, which is why he was antsy about the book's return to print after more than forty years, but I say it's a classic. And that means that even if high school lit teachers are flailing the children with For Whom The Bell Tolls (in this education environment? Who am I kidding?), you should still be able to dig up a copy if you ever take it in mind.

On his sideblog, Steve Sailer, scholar of human diversity, tackles accents:

Accents are normally formed between the ages of 5 and 15 based on what your same-sex friends talk like. That's why brothers and sisters frequently sound differently. Remember Valley Girls? Well, Valley Dudes (like me) didn't sound anything like them. These kind of youth subculture accents often moderate somewhat after 20--you don't hear many 40-year-olds with Valley Girl accents. People can develop new accents after 20--military pilots learn to talk like Chuck Yeager; a friend of mine moved to London and soon had an English accent--but it's less common, perhaps because the urge to fit in less overpowering than during school days. Or maybe because the brain is a lot less flexible after puberty.

This is merely a taste; as usual Steve's packed about 40 interesting observations into 250 words. I've known a couple of Canadians who went to England and came back sounding quite plummy. More interesting to me are the accents coming the other way. I've known a lot of English people who came over in adolescence; some were browbeaten, possibly physically beaten, into speaking near-perfect Canadian, almost eerily perfect Canadian, while others never lost their English cadences. My tentative feeling is that if you come over with one of the traditionally lower-class accents, you hang onto it. Perhaps young Canadians instinctively know to react with extra hostility to BBC English, and apply more intense peer pressure? Ooh, Little Lord Fauntleroy wants to play kickball. Or maybe kids from the industrial North are just better at fighting back...? Come to think of it, that strikes me as not a bad guess at all.

My sister insists that I have a much stronger Canadian accent than she does, but I don't know how that would have happened, since our peer groups came from the same families--most of her classmates were siblings or cousins of my own. Maybe it's a Canadian version of the Valley Girl/Valley Dude thing.

I see I'm still neglecting the site slightly, but I spent much of the day clearing some thickets of entropy in my life, and then was waylaid by a book--by name Men at Arms, the first volume in Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour Trilogy. This is an astonishing little novel of the Sitzkrieg--I can't think, now, having swallowed it in one go, why I didn't expect it to be as funny as it was. And yet it is rare for a book to come so close to moving one to tears.

I will be moving on to Officers and Gentlemen very, very soon, probably before bed tonight. In the meantime I should take the opportunity to recommend, for the benefit of those raised on the corn-mash of Slaughterhouse-Five, previous favourite fiction about the big war. Best, until today, has been Nicholas Monsarrat's The Cruel Sea, a book about corvette service which is a breathtaking capsule education in what it means to be a sailor. Fond as I am of Nevil Shute, I can't forget to mention Most Secret, a nihilistic fantasia redeemed by some neat little artistic touches, and The Chequer Board, a wistful, self-consciously serious book--imperfect, certainly, but I always admire the way Shute creates characters, the way you can feel his love for them, his desire for them to have their desires fulfilled, positively glowing on the page. It was a most particular sort of gift he had. The Ambler, who very kindly introduced me to it, would not want me to omit Piers Paul Read's The Free Frenchman, a highly engrossing account-cum-allegory of the struggle between Fascism, Communism, and the Cross of Lorraine for the soul--and the soil--of France.

And of course there is Catch-22, whose faults I see more clearly than I may have when I was, say, 22, but which I still admire greatly. What novels would you include in a syllabus for the study of World War II fiction?

[UPDATE, February 21: A reader responds.]

Sorry you didn't hear much from me yesterday. I'm a bit ill--not, like, "got a case of eyestrain" ill or "ate something that disagreed with me" ill, but "my immune system is out of dilithium crystals and screaming at the bridge in a Scottish accent" ill. I feel relatively sound at the moment, though I spent the night bathed in a cold sweat so copious that at one point I'm pretty sure it was puddling in my ear. Yesterday, however, was very hard; I stayed home hovering near the toilet, babbling febrile nonsense to my cat, and feeling like Gabriel Byrne after the round of beatings he took in Miller's Crossing. It was just too hard to drag myself to the computer and stare into the cathode light. I think our regularly scheduled programming will resume, more or less, now.

One small, further point about Ric Dolphin and the unsigned editorial in the Telegram; being criticized for intolerance towards Indians by a Newfoundlander is a being like being called on the carpet for anti-Semitism by a German, n'est-ce pas? It's easy to climb a moral high horse when your ancestors pre-empted cultural friction for you by means of extermination. (Rick Hiebert also has a relevant observation.)

Speaking of Newfies--I couldn't resist perpetrating the most inappropriate segue ever here--the residents of the flooded and frozen town of Badger could use a little charitable help. Follow Damian's link and give generously.

The Calgary Herald is, on the whole, a highly admirable newspaper, for my money one of the best half-dozen in the country. Until five days ago one of the good things about it was the presence of Western bureau chief Ric Dolphin, the accomplished, acerbic conservative editorial writer. (To dispense with full disclosure: I've met Dolphin socially, though probably not as many as five times.) Dolphin's specialty is writing things that everybody knows but that it is deemed antagonizing to say out loud. On a recent, extended cook's tour of Western Canada he had readers from Vancouver to the lakehead eating out of the palm of his hand with his descriptions of the space-cadet ski bums in Vernon, B.C., and the brawling blue-collar transients of Brooks, Alta. His columns scarcely ever failed to turn loose a flood of angry letters, but they certainly got people talking about the Herald. He has also been a superior observer of Alberta's political scene.

On February 14, Red Deer Advocate staffer Greg Neiman took the unusual and brave step of reporting on proceedings before the Alberta Press Council involving Dolphin and several columns he had written about Canada's treatment of its aboriginal population. Neiman's column is archived here, for the moment, but I'll quote from it to forestall the inevitable linkrot. Note that Neiman is a member of the APC executive, and that his newspaper is not part of the CanWest chain which owns the Herald.

Recently, the council considered a complex set of complaints against the Calgary Herald; complex because the complaints were lodged from outside Alberta, and because they concerned a series of five columns by Ric Dolphin on a national issue: Canadian supports for native reserves.

Ordinarily, APC doesn't rule on out-of-province complaints, but now that newspapers publish on the Net, it only invites scrutiny from a wider audience. So, we changed our policies to reflect that new reality.

Next, and here comes a tale out of school, the sensitive subject of the complaints, the fact that two observers were in attendance to critique the council's handling of the issue, and a telephone interruption of the meeting by the Herald's legal advisers, lent an atmosphere of drama seldom seen at APC meetings.

In the end, we upheld one complaint against the Herald (parsed by the lawyers on the phone), and dismissed one other. These decisions are on the public record.

The substance of the complaints can be interpreted as a grievance against sweeping generalizations about native reserves, and that our collective guilt over taking Canada away from the First Nations has led to a system where natives are kept in systemic misery, and that the billions of dollars poured into reserves across Canada produce little, if any, good.

That would be a nice description of Dolphin's thesis.

Dolphin, whose career is based on boldly describing things, is not nice in his columns.

The columns purport that the birthrate for native women is three times the national average because welfare rules promote it, and that several fathers, usually absentee, are involved in each family.

One column also points to the the disproportionate incidence of fetal alcohol syndrome among native children, and goes further to suggest that this condition is the basis for a life of unemployment, drug addiction and gang membership. Hmmm.

But for these and other rather inappropriate references, and some dodgy parts that quote "a friend of mine," the Advocate probably would have had no problem running this series. We would have asked for a bit more attribution, and the names of people willing to be quoted on the record, but as a column of opinion, as provocative as it is, it fell within the bounds of journalistic comment.

Again, for clarity, there are parts of these columns I would not want to see in the Advocate, but the thesis is entirely defensible. There is waste of money on reserves. Endless spending programs don't appear to bear fruit. The fact the federal government wants to take over the financial administration of several reserves, away from band councils, speaks volumes.

While the APC upheld one complaint, the chill of future complaints can restrict the ability of journalists to ask hard questions.

But then, I'm fairly confident Dolphin could have sourced all of his statistical claims--and he made many. As far as pure opinion goes--and pure opinion is supposed to be protected by newspapering tradition and the Constitution--his overarching theme was that Indian entitlements are achieving no measurable social progress and might as well be dismantled. (His unsourced quotes, supposedly on "racial matters", mostly contained either ideas for reform or unexceptionable observations about conditions on reserves and in inner cities.) Is such an opinion too controversial to put in print? Perhaps: Dolphin was fired by the Herald on Feb. 14, the same day Neiman's account appeared.

The important thing to note about the Press Council hearing is the "telephone interruption of the meeting" by the Herald's lawyers. Why do you suppose lawyers would be involved in the deliberations of a wholly voluntary watchdog body, one that has specifically eschewed legalistic standards of conduct--one that, in fact, exists mostly to keep lawyers off of the backs of newspapermen? Could it be that the Council was acting under the threat of a Human Rights Commission suit? If so, it's quite the strategic coup for the Indian grievance industry; challenge the APC to do your bidding, and if it doesn't, drag the whole lot--even the papers that didn't run Dolphin's columns, and wouldn't have--before a kangaroo court. I can't say this is what was done, but I know it would probably work if you tried it, and that means none of the august journalists at Alberta's major dailies are safe.

The rationale provided to other employees for Dolphin's firing did not mention any column in particular, and I suppose if you are inclined to fire an opinion writer for having opinions, there are plenty of examples you could dredge up--Dolphin made himself a hate figure in a number of Western towns and throughout the province of Newfoundland during his time as bureau chief. The Telegram of St. John's accused him of "intolerance" in a Feb. 12 column for having compared Newfoundland, in its appetite for federal equalization transfers, to a notorious con man. There can be no question that Dolphin created headaches for his editors with his outlaw prose, and they are absolutely within their rights to dismiss him. Subscribers, too, are within their rights to ask where his byline has gone. And other newspapers are within their rights to report on the matter.

10 days to the Brier, Canada's national curling championship, and you know what that means: it's time for my long-promised apologia for the sport of curling.

Actually the promise started as a joke, but when I got enthusiastic reader feedback from Canada and the U.S., I felt a positive obligation. The truth is, I really do like to watch high-level curling, and I think most Canadians who are sufficiently consonant with the game do, too. It's culturally pristine and thunderingly exciting. None of those shady Shabadabadevs and Smerdyakovs you get with hockey these days... hell, why not be frank? It's sport played by fat drunk white guys for fat drunk white guys. Canada will, I absolutely promise you, embrace the first world-class black or Asian skip with Tiger Woods-like adoration. In the meantime, though, the sport is a slightly whimsical mirror of the palefaced Canadian hinterland; there's no denying the cozy ethno-pastoral aspect. Even at the world level, curling is a ritual for winter people. It's no coincidence that the Brier is sponsored by Nokia, whose Finnish executives very well understand the need for social relief, pretexts for camaraderie, in a slate-gray, emotionally strangulating subarctic February.

Americans sometimes accuse curling--though hesitantly, with a tacit acknowledgment that they may be missing something--of being "shuffleboard on ice." I'm not here to tell you any different, folks. You can absolutely think of it as shuffleboard on ice--albeit with added screaming and frenzied sweeping, and played at the pace and with the intellectual intensity of chess. We'll make a deal, you and I: I won't attempt to explain the concept of a "double raise takeout" to you, and in return you'll acknowledge that curling may have compelling strategic aspects, discernible only to the initiate.

What, then, are the other particular delights of curling?

· In television broadcasts, the players are miked, as a matter of routine, and the fans are privy to tactical conferences--not to speak of jokes, meltdowns, and intra-rink tension. It would be nice if all sports could do this, but only curling's pace and relative non-aggression allow for it without totally alienating family viewers, and it brings the fan into the game in a unique way. You learn something about curling every time you watch; you don't have to rely entirely on the sanitized and possibly ignorant mediation of TV talking heads.

· Curling does not demand the physical commitment that abrades the personality entirely away from nine-tenths of pro athletes. A lot of these guys have day jobs, and the ones who don't aren't becoming effete millionaires by any means. The best rinks aren't psychically separated from the fan by a world of experience, pain, and money. In truth, there are many club curlers who would not embarrass themselves throwing lead rocks for a Brier playoff team. The Brier is a truly democratic event: it doesn't matter if you come from a one-horse town with two sheets and twenty-year-old stones--you've got the same shot in the regionals and the provincials as everyone else. Brier-qualifying rinks from tiny Prince Edward Island and the vast unoccupied northern territories aren't usually as strong as the rinks from the Prairie heartland, it is true, but they are deemed equal in dignity, and are always cheered for by the fans in the host city. The national-unity implications of the Brier are not to be underrated. Its annual television viewership rivals that of the Canadian Football League's Grey Cup, and even the Stanley Cup.

· One doesn't wish to wax over-poetic about the mythic aspects of curling, yet I challenge you to look upon Ailsa Craig without some stir of nameless emotion. This intimidating granite hulk is the ancestral source of most of the world's curling stones; from Sweden to Surrey, the game is thus physically connected to its Scottish origins, a matter of no small import in a country which still bears a broad but little-discussed Scottish streak. You could argue (if you were, say, Bart Giamatti) that, artistically, the curling sheet and stones harmoniously integrate severe modernist planes and perfect circles with something Druidic and rough. Ken Burns only made a documentary about baseball because he had no idea of the materials available for a similar series about curling.

We think of ice as being a Euclidean, frictionless medium; but friction is essential to the "curling" action of the curling stone, and the surface of a curling sheet is gently "pebbled", not smooth. The manufacture of a curling surface is a distinctive art form, never successfully mechanized; it is practiced mostly by underpaid or unpaid lovers of the sport.

I could go on, but I fear I'll never seduce anyone who hasn't sat in a tiny, frigid arena on slivery wooden seats, breathing in the mingled smells of spiked coffee, corn brooms, and asbestos insulation. The joy of hockey is something Canadians have shared, willingly and successfully, with the world. Curling--and I speak of a whole universe here, not a mere sport--is a rude, goofy pleasure we have reserved to ourselves. Even to speak of it to a foreign audience--and "foreign" here includes Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver--feels slightly treasonous. Maybe you should accept that you're not supposed to understand what all the screaming is about, eh?

But I will leave you with the irresistible news item that is dominating pre-Brier coverage: the skip who leads the rink representing Ontario, Bryan Cochrane, cannot shout instructions to his sweepers because of growths on his vocal cords. He has been allowed, to the mild consternation of his opponents, to use a whistle during play.

"I'm not proud to use the whistle," Cochrane, 45, croaked over the telephone Tuesday. "I don't try to abuse it and don't try to blow it too hard. I keep it to a little tweet here and a little tweet there."

Did you know the flight-sim hobby had come quite this far? MeFi linked to Vatsim, the home of "virtual air traffic simulation" (uh... virtual simulation?), but the poster, inhibited by lack of space, didn't quite capture what's interesting about this.

Beginning with Microsoft's Flight Simulator Version 5.0, we could simulate flying to many parts of the world. Flying, however, was a very lonely proposition. There were no other airplanes in the skies while we flew enroute, and our arrivals at major airports were like landing in ghost towns. There was dynamic scenery and, beginning with Microsoft's Flight Simulator 98, multi-player capability to keep you company. But other than that, Flight Simulator, as wonderful a program as it has been throughout its history, fell flat when it came to simulating air traffic control.

This comes from the "about Vatsim" page. By 1997, collaborative Internet play of flight-sim programs had appeared, as had an application for realtime online air traffic control of other players' flight. Today Vatsim provides an entire virtual interactive world in which you can fly as a pilot--joining one of several organized virtual airlines--or work ATC at an airport of your choice. Vatsim World has its own weather and supports many different flight-sim and controller platforms. Some of the airlines throw challenging assignments at players; some carefully mimic the routes and traffic of real airlines; some focus on certain models of aircraft, or revive dead brands (get your wings with Virtual Braniff!). Truly, this is some marvelously/ominously complicated social networking.

US Banker has an exemplary, readable biz story (I always admire these because they're not my own strong suit) about the mergers that Canada's big five banks want, and probably won't ever get. I'm not sure if Canada's very different banking culture is a source of distinctiveness from the U.S. or a symptom of it. Perhaps a bit of both. It is highly amusing to see Canadian bankers trying to swallow the inevitable and suppress their hunger to put the great, timeless oligopoly on a narrower footing. "Yes," they seem to say, "we're hugely profitable, we're growing, significant players in the American market while remaining unchallenged at home... but we want da candy!"

[BMO CEO Tony Comper] is willing to concede what has become almost painfully obvious: that, while mergers "are not about strategy," he'd like to do one. "The fact of the matter is, you could execute your strategy at a much faster pace if you had the wider capital base that would come through a domestic merger."

"This isn't about our being unable to be successful without a merger," [Comper] says. "It's about how fast we can execute our strategy."

Via Romenesko, we discover a long and compelling Chicago Magazine wrap-up of the ravaged career of sap pedlar and serial womanizer Bob Greene. If there were a Pulitzer for single, gem-like details, I'd suggest giving it to this sentence:

The mixture of sentimentality and commerce that characterizes Greene's later work seems to have roots in his family. His father, Robert Sr., was the president and chief executive officer of a baby shoe bronzing company...

But of course.

The National Post's early print edition has a detailed preview of today's federal budget from Anne Dawson and Robert Fife. On the cards: a $8B surplus and heavy, heavy spending increases.

John Manley, the Finance Minister, will unveil a budget today that gives more money than expected to health, defence, daycare, foreign aid and infrastructure as he reveals an $8-billion surplus, sources say. The surplus is $1-billion more than he anticipated last fall and will help fund Jean Chretien's desire to leave a social legacy by increasing total program spending by 8% to $145.5-billion next year. ...Program spending increased by almost 13% from $119.3-billion in 2000-01 to $134.79-billion this fiscal year ending March 31.

These long-term spending commitments are all horrible, completely jive-ass news for those hoping for serious middle-class tax relief. Dawson and Fife do forecast some light corporate tax breaks--you know, the kind that would get a Republican lynched in the U.S. Stephen Harper challenged the government yesterday to cut the Goods and Services Tax, and right now he's lying awake hoping they didn't take his suggestion. Liberal leader-in-waiting Paul Martin was no doubt doing the same thing, but he's probably up and around (maybe weblogging!) by now. Imagine if Manley had been manly enough to carve the GST back to 5%. It might have made 2004's Liberal "coronation" a little more interesting, now wouldn't it? But apparently monkey-wrenching Paul Martin's future is only second-highest on Chretien's secret list of heart's desires; the Little Guy is busy building a "legacy", particularly in Europe (with environmental policy) and Africa (with foreign aid)--and legacies don't come cheap.

Now that Blogger's been purchased by Google, are they going to rename it Booger? Someone has to have made this joke already...

Speaking of Booger™, Sarah's permalinks aren't working but the entry entitled "Best Movie Ever..." contains my advice to those quitting smoking.

At last, a left-wing sheet (the Guardian) spots a genuine Bushism--a real error with real (though symbolic) consequences, instead of some trivial slip of the tongue excavated by hypercritical transliteration. Unfortunately the speaker isn't G.W., but Jeb:

Mr. Bush was in Madrid on a trade mission when, paying tribute to Jose Maria Aznar, the prime minister, he said: "I would like to finish by thanking the president of the Republic of Spain for his friendship with the United States."

CLANG! The Spanish parliamentary monarchy has been restored for 28 years--which is no trivial point of pride for Spaniards. How could the governor make such an error? I was inclined to attribute it to subliminal American hostility to monarchical forms of government. My guess, however, is that Bush's staff got tripped up by a semantic quirk in the Spanish constitution. Aznar, the head of government and the man usually called "the prime minister" in foreign newspapers like the Guardian, actually bears the title Presidente del Gobierno--President of the Government. Spain has a system that, in this respect, is halfway between American republicanism and the Westminster model: the King chooses a president who is then invested (or rejected) for a set term by an absolute majority of the Cortes. The Cortes may defeat the executive by means of a vote of non-confidence, so in this sense it is correct to refer to Aznar as a "prime minister". However, Gov. Bush's people, eager to get the protocol right, would have been surrounded by briefing papers referring to the Presidente. It's not quite usual for a person with this title to head the government in a parliamentary monarchy (more normally, a "President" would be what Westminster style calls the Speaker), and so Bush's faux pas slipped by unnoticed when someone had a brainfart and forgot three decades of Spanish history.

That's just a guess. Others will prefer to assume that Bush was slyly expressing the traditional familial admiration for Franco and other dictators, etc., etc., etc.

While American readers observe Presidents' Day, we here in Alberta are enjoying the provincial statutory holiday known as "Family Day". Introduced in 1990, the holiday has never quite escaped the stigma attached to its origins. According to the legend, the premier at the time, Don Getty, was having a spasm of bad paternal conscience after his son Dale was sent to the pokey for cocaine trafficking. If only he'd spent more quality time with his wayward son, things might have been different--but, dammit, he could do something about it, couldn't he? And so one weekend out of every year in Alberta is devoted to awkwardly papering over family dysfunction.

Alberta small businesses howled when Getty pushed Family Day down their throats, and his successor, current premier Ralph Klein, made a campaign promise to relent on its statutory status. But by then it was already too late. The optics of "cancelling Family Day" would have been far too ghastly for a conservative premier to confront. Today Dale is, by all accounts, sober and successful--a triumphant outcome for what may be the most heavy-handed "intervention" in the annals of substance abuse. For his part, Papa cites Family Day as the most significant and enduring positive achievement of his administration. Who would dream of disagreeing?

Jeremy Lott is at it again! The former Reason staffer was at a Baptist Sunday-school class in his sleepy Dutch hometown in Washington State when the teacher started extolling the Christian virtue of the war of drugs. My own personal favourite drug-warrior canard was flung at J-Lo during the affray: "There isn't good scientific research on the effects of many drugs, including pot." As I pointed out in my Up Front column in August, even the most clueless layperson can do a Medline search for "marijuana" and find abstracts of more than 8,000 articles that have appeared in the scientific literature since 1970. When shirty footwashers tell you there's "no research" on pot, they really mean there's no research confirming what they'd like you to believe--namely, that your first puff of the weed will plunge you into a private hell of uncontrolled hallucinations and horse-tranquilizer binges.

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY
APPROPRIATE PANIC REACTIONS TO THREAT LEVEL ADVISORIES
February 15, 2003
EYES ONLY - NOT YET APPROVED BY THE COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF

· Low (Green): No outright panic necessary, though citizens should continue to take ordinary daily precautions like shoulder-checking before a lane change and not mixing antidepressants with alcohol. Remember, the government can only protect you from terrorists, not from yourself! (N.B.: government protection from terrorists may vary in quality.)

· Guarded (Blue): Mild nervousness recommended. Chewing of fingernails, frequent side-to-side glances, grinding of teeth during sleep hours are suitable patriotic gestures during a Blue Alert. Helpful phrases to remember: "Did you hear something?" "I don't remember seeing him on this bus before." "Honey, maybe we should update our will."

· Elevated (Yellow): During a Yellow Alert one's appropriate panic state should be somewhere between "Oh shit, the final exam's tomorrow" and "I'm really too young to get married." U.S. citizens should perspire freely and utter frequent, spontaneous expletives during a state of Elevated Awareness. Pick meaningless verbal fights with friends and relatives, but stop short of physical brawls. Occasional choked sobs in public places are encouraged.

· High (Orange): The Orange Alert is a state of free-flowing paranoia stopping short of outright public disorder. Hurling imprecations at the Deity of your choice is recommended, as is the construction of backyard arks and/or demented, meticulous, eerily compelling works of garbage sculpture. You may wish to convert major financial assets into bullion, call old girlfriends at 2 a.m., or spread exaggerated stories about helicopters piloted by men in Hazmat suits and Mexican towns that "suddenly disappeared from the map". Gunfire during High Awareness periods should be confined to domestic or work disputes, and not yet directed at random bystanders.

· Severe (Red): In the event of a Red Alert, citizens will hardly need to be instructed to loot ruined American cities and rob or devour the dead. In such a difficult hour, however, we will need to pull together and remember other easily-overlooked panic responsibilities. Did you remember to speak in tongues and confess publicly to disgusting habits and/or crimes committed before the Day of Black Fire? Have you acquired the necessary equipment for a garish suicide and/or Oedipal self-blinding? Will you be ready in advance to choose a charismatic survivor to act as the centre of a bizarre, nomadic personality cult? Managing America's descent into barbarism safely and sanely is everybody's responsibility.

"There had been abuse in my family... but it was mostly musical in nature." The trailer for A Mighty Wind is now online. So is a disappointingly short list of cities for the Apr. 16 opening. Oh, mighty wind, when will you blow through Edmonton's snow-covered streets?

Admit it, Weisblott--you thought you were being terribly clever when you submitted that self-lacerating article to the college paper under the flimsy, over-the-top alias "Samara Marblestone". Come on, dude, fess up.

It took a lot of guts for Andrew Coyne to stand up in front of the massed ranks of Canada's chattering classes Saturday at a Montreal conference organized by the Institute for the Study of Canada at McGill University. Here's the lede of Irwin Block's account for the "CanWest News Service" (and you can start saying a sad, slow goodbye, I suppose, to the old "Southam News" identifier):

Supporters of public broadcasting squared off against a National Post columnist yesterday during a debate about whether CBC-TV deserves public funding. In today's multi-channel universe, the need for a federally funded public broadcaster is "slim indeed, if not defunct," the Post's Andrew Coyne told a national media conference in Montreal. "The bad news is that the CBC is increasingly obsolete; the good news is that it is increasingly unnecessary," Mr. Coyne told a panel on the final day of a conference called "Who Controls the Media."

Pitted against Mr. Coyne was a chorus of CBC-TV and Tele-Quebec defenders, including journalists, broadcast executives, and lobbyists, who said public broadcasters have a unique societal role to play beyond the ratings-based, for-profit alternatives.

A major news event, like the friendly fire deaths of Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan, got a scroll across the bottom of CNN screens. CBC handled it as a major story with political ramifications, Mr. Rabinovitch said.

If war breaks out in Iraq, CBC will have more television and radio journalists covering it than any other Canadian electronic outlet to offer "a uniquely Canadian interpretation of events."

Where's the relevance, Bob? CBC Newsworld is funded out of cable revenues, and Coyne, in his talk, specifically defended it. ("He urged the CBC to start paying for itself in a variety of ways, including a pay-TV model, such as CBC Newsworld has on cable systems.") And didn't Global cover the friendly-fire story? Didn't CTV cover it? Didn't, for that matter, the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail and the National Post cover it? Why is CNN the issue here? CBC privatization wouldn't be especially good for the journalistic labour market, but it seems to me we do have a lot of voices, other than the CBC, telling us "our stories"--when it comes to journalism, anyway.

I, personally, am willing to hazard a guess that I get my money's worth out of CBC, more or less. But I haven't been given a choice in the matter, and neither has anyone else. I can almost overlook the fact that "Canadian culture" and "Canadian interpretation[s] of events" boil down, in truth, to the Weltanschauung of a certain class, with a certain background and certain political beliefs, dwelling in a certain small strip of this great country. There are some practical positives to elitist control of the CBC, and to the elitist mandate thereof. What's unacceptable is this rhetorical limbo that the elite is forced to dwell in while defending its own interests to the knife. What underlies their sly words about "social importance" and "Canadian interpretations"? Aren't these subtle confessions that the CBC is a state propaganda instrument? If they were forced to call the spade by its true name, could they really defend it?

As I see it, they can't have it both ways. If the CBC has a genuine importance, it must be as an instrument of certain social goals settled upon by the state (and, one hopes, consented to by at least some overwhelmingly significant portion of the citizenry). When you're the state broadcaster you can't just fall back upon gesticulating vaguely in the direction of your own supposed excellence. So Quirks and Quarks is a good radio science show: so what? You have to meet a higher standard than that if you're going to steal money from people in the form of taxes. Heck, I'd like to do my weblog as a full-time job, and I think that would be a pretty excellent manifestation of distinctively "Canadian culture" too, but nobody would think it reasonable for me to burglarize my neighbours' houses to pay for it. Guys like Rabinovitch don't realize just how spectacularly, continentally far they are from providing a moral justification for their well-recompensed existences.

Of course, we can't expect him to preface every comment about state broadcasting with a grovelling, sobbing apology to everybody in this country who earns their own living. Still, it's an enduring mystery that clients of the state think the source of their paycheque renders them morally superior rather than inferior. This is a universal Canadian tendency, stretching across the spectrum from the first-year nurse and the schoolteacher to the Prime Minister's Office. The habit of saying to these people "Hey--why am I paying you to disagree with me?" is one we need to acquire. Then "debates" like the one at McGill could start off on the correct footing.

Via Drudge, we have a Time story that alludes to a John Wilkes Booth-style attack along with other terror possibilities for the U.S.:

Counterterrorism officials say they received a phone tip that unnamed members of Congress could be the targets of assassination attempts. On Wednesday, U.S. Capitol Police chief Terry Gainer warned House members to be on alert for attempts on their lives.

I hope this possibility is moving onto the agenda. Since 9/11--and of course it's understandable that this is so--the thrust of counterterror planning has been preparing for expensive, chancy, histrionic attacks which would require massive technical assistance and know-how from abroad. There's no question that we need to keep an eye on crop dusters, nuclear plants, water supplies, what have you. But for the determined enemies of America, human life is the cheapest commodity. What could they achieve for the additional price of 50 crummy handguns and 10 good hunting rifles? If I had to bet on what form the blow will take--if it comes at all--this is where I'd put my money.

Hey kids! I've posted a chart of the Hollywood Stock Exchange option prices for Oscar stocks. For those not familiar with the HSX, the prices--and the probabilities they imply, which I've provided--will show you what a mature artificial market makes of the Oscar races. HSX players won't be much interested in the table because I'll only be doing updates occasionally. The HSX main page is here.

The Exchange is not a real-money market, and it can be consistently beaten by an individual because your investment in any one stock is sharply limited. The relationship between purchaser behaviour and prices is regulated by a "central bank", a frustrating feature of the game. There's plenty of friction in the information flow, but the HSX has been shown empirically to be market-like--for what that's worth.

Cory Doctorow notes at BoingBoing that CBC-1 radio's science program Quirks & Quarks did a roundtable on biological warfare today. Sure, Doc, pick the most depressing part of the show; that's the kind of upbeat stuff we need in the middle of February with all the world's politicians acting like enraged Yetis. In the spirit of ignoring the inevitable, I'll point out that Quirks closed today with the announcement that the host, science-education footsoldier Bob McDonald, is soon to receive an honourary doctorate from the University of Guelph. To celebrate, the producers interrupted the show and played an audio clip from The Wizard of Oz--the one in which the unmasked charlatan of the title, unable to provide the Scarecrow with a brain, gives him a university degree instead.

If I seem vexed about my income and lethargic about weblogging lately, it's because I've been busy dealing with fallout from an amazing Revenue Canada stunt I didn't even know they were technically capable of. If you should be unlucky enough to owe them money, they can phone up your bank, without mentioning anything at all to you in advance, and say, "Hey, be a sport give us all of the money from So-and-So's chequing account." And your bank will do it, because they believe in service with a smile. You get a copy of the notice, when they get around to sending you one--in my case, a week later. Fortunately, the amount of money in my bank account was small, a fact the old enemy, in its hunger for gelt, failed to anticipate. Still, small though it was, that money was meant for people who have Colby Cosh-signed cheques, so I've been busy obtaining cash, getting it into their hands, and making groveling apologies. The irony is that RevCan took almost precisely the amount I was going to send them next week after my most recent paycheque cleared. So aside from the transitory embarrassment--financial bozo though I am, I've never bounced a cheque before--their manoeuvre is a wash, budget-wise.

I'm scarcely even angry about this, for my debt to the commissars is old and, of late, completely neglected. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, and it took them a long time to start squeaking. In a way it's kind of a welcome wake-up call, a signal that I need to start getting that last few thousand in cobwebbed tax debt from old freelance income out of the way. It means fresh austerities at ColbyCosh.com headquarters, naturally. If you'll excuse me, I'm off to the supermarket to buy baked beans and ramen noodles--in bulk.

Hey, you guys read the Onion book Our Dumb Century, right? Remember how one of the joke '70s news stories had a halftone picture of President Ford next to the headline "NATIONAL MOOD RING GREEN"? I just realized, that's what this coloured-alert system is. It's the U.S.'s national mood ring! [UPDATE, 10:40 am: Turns out Jim Henley beat me to this. Figures. That's why he's Henley and I'm just me!]

You know what else? Did you ever see the British TV series "The Prisoner"? CNN really needs to unearth the footage of Peter Swanwick as the Supervisor snarling "ORANGE ALERT", for the next time the mood ring goes all orangey. (Here is a summary of Swanwick's career as a character actor.)

I may get occasional hate mail, but unlike Dave Stevens, I've never gotten it from a little kid.

Jeremy Lott does seem to have a gift for getting into shouting matches, doesn't he? In a piece for the American Prowler, J-Lo, a former staffer at WorldNetDaily, writes that WND leaves its writers plenty of leeway on issues and is admirably free of party-line thinking--but...

...of course WND is a conservative news and views site, and it seems silly to say otherwise (similar to the right-leaning Fox News Channel selling itself as "fair and balanced"). Most of the employees are conservative Christians and I'm betting that a tally of their ballots cast in 2000 would have revealed roughly the reverse of Slate's lopsided pro-Gore consensus. Editors aren't allowed to link to articles from Salon because of the latter's use of erotic artwork galleries as part of the premium package for subscribers. Likewise, any profanity in an article renders it immediately unlinkable. The offerings from WND Books--a collaboration between WorldNetDaily and Thomas Nelson--mostly sound familiar conservative themes (liberalism bad, traditional values good).

I daresay J-Lo knew how WND boss Joseph Farah would take this--which is to say, not well. I once referred to WND as "conservative" in passing, in my print column; it got back to me that Farah was unhappy about this. He must spend a lot of time feeling unhappy, since his website is bedecked with well-known "conservative" figures who are not at all shy about embracing the term. I was merely calling things as I saw them; if I'd known in advance about Joe's idiosyncracy, I'd have gladly steered clear. J-Lo doesn't have much excuse, and Farah roasted the hell out of him in a letter to the Prowler (some downward scrolling required at that link):

I'll... never understand why seemingly intelligent people are so eager to place people in convenient little ideological boxes--even when those people lifelong journalists who have never sought to run for office, campaign for any candidate, nor even register for a political party.

...WorldNetDaily is run by a man who hates the term "conservative" and fully explains why in great detail in columns and in his new book. Yet you suggest he runs a "conservative" news section.

I kid you not: I would quit what I am doing tomorrow if your perception were reality. Nothing would displease me more. I am not a conservative and I believe every single staffer at WorldNetDaily would agree that I am the moving philosophical and journalistic force at WND. So, tell me, how can that be?

You are seeing the world through your own narrow lens. You break the world down into neat little packages of liberals and conservatives. Good for you. Just don't insult your colleagues because of your own hangups. We don't see the world that way.

The Rabbit has discovered a college course wherein students are assigned to "document a weblog" for four to five weeks.

Your paper should describe the site in question and discuss the issues it raises. While you are following the weblog and when you are writing your paper you should consider several questions:

· Who is the intended audience of this weblog?
· Why do you think motivates the author of this weblog?
· Who is writing the weblog?
· How often do they add entries to their site?
· Why do you think the creator established this weblog?
· Do you find yourself agreeing or disagreeing with the author? Why?

You can choose any weblog you want.

I'm hoping someone will pick me. Maybe I can even add to the list:

· Why do you think this weblog isn't more popular?
· How do you account for the creator's lack of success with women and the 20% decline in his real income over the last five years?
· Shouldn't there be, like, all kinds of Javascript doohickeys on this site? Was it coded by gibbons or what?
· Do you think this looks like a melanoma? I'm thinking I should get it checked out.
· How come all these bands like Korn and Staind and Linkin Park have to have misspellings in their names? Don't they realize that surly "yoof" misspellings were already kind of old when the Beatles did it?

It has to be remembered, incidentally, if we're going to talk about the artistic credibility of Metallica, that the band's name is in fact "Metallica". Before "And Justice For All" made a convert out of me I used to sit there giggling for hours at the name "Metallica". I mean, talk about a commitment to truth in advertising.

You know what the problem is with those other bands, man? Their names just aren't Metal enough.

I know what you mean, dude. AC/DC? That sounds like the name of a bisexual disco or something.

Totally. And Iron Maiden had the right idea, but that "Maiden" part totally ruins it. Lars was checking the dictionary one time and he says a "maiden" is, like, a virgin girl! Come on! That's like broadcasting that you don't want 'tang backstage!

OK, so our name has to be one hundred percent Metal. We need to show the world we're not compromisers and shit. All Metal, all the time.

Rock on! OK, so my first idea was: "Aluminica".

Dude, that sounds too much like some kind of... one of those immigrant countries, you know? People are gonna think we're Mexicans.

Well, my other concept along those lines was "Ironica", but that doesn't really work for me.

I was thinking we could go with "Nickelback." Nickel's a metal.

Sounds too much like a species of fish, dude. Remember how we were gonna call ourselves "Steelhead" but then your uncle started laughing at us?

Oh man, good point. I guess we'd better get Lars in on this, 'cause he's the smart one. We got in pretty deep doo-doo for punching your uncle.

It looks rather like Eric Alterman owes somebody else an apology.

Headline: former Metallica bass player in discovers-the-bleeding-obvious shock!

"It's a joke, I think Metallica are just a joke, I don't think they have any idea. I am a fan of Metallica again, I did my thing in there and felt good and I'm proud of that shit and I am more proud than sour," [Jason Newsted] said in an online conversation with the British magazine. "But that's the integrity down the fucking tube!" he said of the band's choice to participate in the Summer Sanitarium tour 2003, kicking off in July.

"What they are doing now is such an obvious cash thing and has nothing to do with the music that we're supposed to be fighting for," he said.

And in one final Metallica slam, he dissed drummer Lars Ulrich by writing: "Lars--he hasn't practiced enough drums over the years. He let his art fall away from him, he doesn't have the same finesse as he used to have."

Still, it's a little hard to question the pure commitment to noise of a guy who leaves Metallica and joins Voivod. Canadians will know Voivod as "that band from Quebec you hear on MuchMusic sometimes, the ones who sound like a big crate of plugged-in electric instruments being pitched down five flights of stairs."

[UPDATE, February 14: Bruce Rolston retorts. Is Voivod the unofficial soundtrack to the Canadian Forces' various foreign adventures? Could the feudal connotations of their name in Slavonic languages have unwittingly worsened conflict in the Balkans when Canuck peacekeepers played their albums?]

Here's Mark Steyn, speaking in the John Hawkins interview you probably already read:

I'm not very computer-minded. I never had one until 1999, when the Telegraph and the National Post sent me off to cover the impeachment trial and, because of the time differences and other factors, they demanded I get a laptop. Before then, I had a stenographer, and I suppose she had a typewriter or some such, though I never checked. She definitely had a dictation pad. Actually, she still does, and I still like to work that way.

Who wouldn't? Take a memo, Miss Shapely! Actually I have to assume that Steyn is employing the last living stenographer in the New World, some 96-year-old relic who refuses to retire and leave the world to the soulless mercies of the automatons. He probably gets a lot of snippy comments about how he isn't fit to carry Irvin S. Cobb's inkwell. "Slow down, sonny, I lost the hearing in that ear on Utah Beach!"

I've finished writing about Switzerland after an all-nighter: thanks to the Swiss reader who offered timely help in response to my request here on the site (I totally can't believe that worked). Oh, and you wiseasses who didn't quite get the joke about the "prime number following 19" can stop sending me e-mails with "23" in the header. Top marks for sarcasm go to the guy who sent a ready-to-execute Python script for the Sieve of Eratosthenes.

I'm so tired right now that these headlines about Stinger missiles, tanks surrounding Heathrow, and Black Hawk helicopters over major American cities just seem like gruesome dreams. The National Post isn't helping convince me I'm awake, either. Actual headline: "The four horsemen are saddling up." Yeah, I'm definitely dreaming this right now. I can say anything I want because it's a dream, pee pee poo poo la la la.

Since this is a dream, let's deal with the lede from a chilling NatPost front-pager by the excellent Robert Fife:

OTTAWA - Canadian and U.S. authorities believe al-Qaeda terrorist cells may be plotting assassinations of high-profile political figures in North America, sources say.

New intelligence obtained by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the FBI and the CIA has led to concerns that several hundred Islamic extremists in North America are linked to al-Qaeda, with some in organized cells that could be ordered to carry out terrorist attacks.

Sources say the most recent intelligence suggests some of the cells operating in Canada and the United States are preparing to assassinate prominent U.S. politicians. The high-level sources suggested Canadian politicians should not be complacent in assuming they will not be targets.

If you had the funding and the authority, could you assemble 50 people for a John Wilkes Booth-style conspiracy against the U.S. cabinet, top legislators, and other prominent figures? Absolutely you could. Al-Qaeda managed to scrape together 19 people for an outright suicide mission (though we don't know for sure that all 19 suspects boarded the planes). This isn't like that; you've got a chance, ranging from slim to excellent depending on your target, to get away clean. Remember that Lee Harvey Oswald shot at a general, blew away a President, killed a policeman, and caught half of a double feature before he got nabbed.

MSNBC has the scoop on the next big thing: broadband delivery via power lines. Hyuk, hyuk. I'm no tech journalist or expert, but even I know that we've been hearing about this one for a long time. I used to call news stories like this "stories about blimps"--I named them, you see, for the articles you see once every eighteen months or so, without fail, about the Golden Age of Airships and how it came to an end so needlessly, and how some plucky firm, if it can just find enough nervy investors, may well bring back those halcyon days of silent transatlantic zeppelin travel. The technology is sound! Unless there's a high wind! It does not matter, apparently, that blimps have failed 20 or 30 times to make that ever-imminent big comeback: business editors will go on assigning their blimp stories, complete with elaborate reasons why the last guy who tried to revive the blimp industry was a total idiot and did everything all wrong. And so it goes.

Anyway, before I could propagate my blimp meme in a forum like this, someone came up with the perfect, elegant, equally gassy word "vapourware". I could be jealous, but I'm just so glad we have this concept now--I can't complain!

I'm going to be honest with you: I had considered cheating here, and waiting until the prices for the Oscar options on the Hollywood Stock Exchange had started fluctuating. Markets, even artificial ones, anticipate real-world events better than most individuals can--even when I'm the individual. I may do an entry about the HSX prices when the IPO ends over there. In the meantime I suppose I should fall back on my own native wisdom, enhanced by some casual quantitative studies of Oscar forecasting I did back when I was still interested in this stuff.

To dispense with the obvious picks: Chicago will be your Best Picture, which makes Rob Marshall an overwhelming favourite for Best Director. Nicholson has sentiment and age on his side in the Best Actor category. Catherine Zeta-Jones has timed her trial perfectly, and should be rewarded with a Best Supporting Actress statuette for defending the privacy "rights" of movie stars. I'm not too worried about Queen Latifah splitting the vote there. Nia Vardalos will win the Original Screenplay Oscar as an acknowledgment of the totally unprecedented commercial achievement of My Big Fat Piece of Ethnic-Flavoured Wedding-Porn--it's very hard to imagine anyone wanting her to lose. I imagine the technically accomplished Ice Age will win Best Animated Feature. And you just know they're going to give the Documentary Feature Oscar to Michael Moore, who reflects Hollywood's hysterical, impoverished political worldview back at it in fake-populist form. That's reason enough not to watch the ceremony right there.

All this doesn't leave much suspense for Oscar night, but Best Actress is up in the air. I believe the two favourites are probably Salma Hayek for Frida and Renée Zellweger for Chicago. Hayek worked hard (and fended off Madonna) to get Frida to the screen, so I'll predict that the industry will give her the award. I have misgivings about not simply picking Chicago to run the table, but Salma's my choice until you hear different from me.

In the Supporting Actor category we have that rarest of events: five nominees who all really deserve to be honoured for their acting. We can probably rule out Paul Newman, who has three Oscar statuettes at home. (There is, no doubt, still some lingering embarrassment over his receipt of the "Sorry We've Never Given You One Of These" Oscars in 1986, followed immediately by his outright Supporting win in 1987 for The Color of Money.) John C. Reilly is terrific, apparently well-liked, and has the Chicago advantage, but really didn't pile up all that much screen time. Ed Harris seems to get nominated every year--if he didn't win for The Truman Show or Pollock it's hard to imagine him winning as male scenery in The Hours. Chris Cooper is obviously the sort of guy who should get an Oscar, but never does.

I guess you can tell I'm leaning toward Walken. Did you know it's been twenty-four years since he's been nominated for his only Academy Award? Granted, he won it (and deserved it, for The Deer Hunter), but winning just once doesn't stop anybody from winning a second time; I rather think it equips us with the important information that people in Hollywood like him enough to give him that sort of honour. His Catch Me If You Can performance wasn't especially demanding, yet it showed us what's great about Walken. He's someone you think of for creep or psycho roles, yet Spielberg went to him to play a man with fading, but still enormous, con-man charm. Walken doesn't disappear in a role; you're always aware that you're watching Walken. But although he's hardly a watchword for versatility, he really does seem to have the personality and physical ability to tackle anything. The Oscar buzz started the minute that movie came out, and while Oscar buzz is a dangerous guide for actual prediction, Walken is my pick. Adaptation will get the consolation prize of the Adapted Screenplay Oscar--who could resist voting for it?

Kim Bolan, a Vancouver Sun reporter who has been deservedly lionized for her courage, tells a short anecdote in a Feb. 11 profile of Inderjit Singh Reyat, an electrician who has pleaded guilty to collecting materials for the bomb that killed 329 people aboard Air India Flight 182 in June 1985.

A devout Sikh who supported the struggle for an independent Sikh nation in India, he moved to Vancouver Island in the mid-1970s and almost immediately became embroiled in sometimes raucous temple politics.

He once tried to force worshippers attending a temple wedding to put scarves on their heads, even though it was not the practice of the pioneer Sikhs at the time. That almost kept the groom's father, Rajinder Singh Mayo, out of the wedding.

"He was not going to let me go in for my own son's wedding," Mayo once recalled to the Vancouver Sun. "He was really active politically in the local community."

So Eric Alterman is going to apologize for his comments about Rush Limbaugh in Esquire magazine, is he? He can apologize all he likes, but I'm afraid he won't be able to beat the first-degree cluelessness rap he has hung on himself. Alterman let the following bomb drop while plugging his book (and remember, there's no such thing as bad publicity):

[Limbaugh] has an army. I think [Bill] O'Reilly and [Chris] Matthews are entertainers. I don't think anybody would follow the other two into the fire, but Limbaugh is different. The lack of civility that he demonstrates toward liberal politicians is really dangerous to our political public. I hate to say it, but I wish the guy would have gone deaf. I shouldn't say that, but on behalf of the country, it would be better without Rush Limbaugh and his 20 million listeners.

The Instapundit seems contented in advance with Alterman's planned "handsome apology for a thoughtless remark". Well, I suppose I can accept the professor's assurance that an apology is planned, but I'm afraid the "handsomeness" of it will be irrelevant. A remark is self-evidently not "thoughtless" if you preface it with "I hate to say it" or "I shouldn't say that." Clearly, Alterman knew what he was about to unload. Moreover, he raised the stakes on himself, twice, by (a) claiming preposterously to speak "on behalf of the country" and (b) complaining about Limbaugh's own "lack of civility" (!!!!). And, to top it all off, the resulting publicity is only going to further sales of his book--hell, I'm helping sell his book right now.

Everybody wrings their hands about Ann Coulter's various toxic bon mots, and I'm sure she's said things I wouldn't care to defend, but Alterman's statement is far less excusable, by the commonly accepted standard of "hateful" speech, than anything I know Coulter to have uttered. Sometimes she makes remarks with an obvious satirical component, or at least an obvious satirical interpretation, like her crack about wishing the 9/11 planes had hit the New York Times building. Sometimes she makes outrageous claims about liberalism--"slander", "treason", what have you--but she's been relatively careful about documenting her reasons, adequate or not, for slinging words like this. When Alterman says he wishes Limbaugh had gone deaf ("stayed deaf" would have been more accurate), he's not making an accusation, or an implied argument, or a statement which shows any external evidence of ironic intent. He just wishes, honestly, that God would silence the man. (How God or Eric Alterman intend to dispose of the 20 million listeners, I wouldn't care to speculate.)

And, frankly, there's not so much very wrong with letting loose the occasional flip, obnoxious comment; our frenzied self-policing about these things recalls McLuhan's maxim that "Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity." Why doesn't Alterman stand by his statement and take his lumps?--is it because he hopes to keep his badge and remain on duty with the Rhetorical Vice Squad? I put it to you that Alterman's not apologizing because he honestly feels he's said anything wrong; he's apologizing because he knows that if the statement is left out there in the sun to fester, it will reflect badly on him, on the American left, and on his crusade against the concept of liberal media bias. I'm in strong sympathy with Alterman's core idea that we are better served by an openly adversarial media, though I wouldn't blow off "objectivity" as haphazardly as he does. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a commentator on the opposite side who was as generous as Alterman is about Fox News (which, he says, "probably does a better job of reporting the news in an understandable way than CNN or NBC, because it provides a context")--though if media bias is real, and it is, then Alterman can well afford to be generous. But this incident is pathetic, and an apology will make it more so, not less.

[UPDATE, 2:09 pm: Alterman's mea culpa is at the tail end of this weblog entry.]

From the inbox (there are a lot of these "from the inbox"-es lately because I don't have to hoard small news items for my column, which has been overset for one issue): Alexis Peters tells the Calgary Herald's Mario Toneguzzi (sorry, no link) that "hockey culture" turns Canadian men...into Canadian MONSTROSITIES!

Peters, an assistant professor in the kinesiology department at the University of Lethbridge, says in a research paper--the first Canadian study of its kind--that sports like hockey that celebrate "extreme masculinity" encourage young men to engage in violence to themselves and others, repress their physical and emotional pain, and deny their personal needs. Her research focused on a group of Junior A players from the Ontario Hockey Association who completed seven separate questionnaires designed to measure their social health by assessing their attitudes toward male/female relationships.

Warning: quantitative measures of "social health" may have nothing to do with Dr. Peters' field of expertise. Warning: such measures may simply be a fancy way for Dr. Peters to turn prejudices into "research". Warning: strong bullshit smell may indicate actual bullshit.

I would like to know--and I'm too busy writing about Switzerland to ask--what the sports are which do not celebrate "extreme masculinity", as participated in by men. Well, er, um, ahhh, there's figure skating, and, errrr... did I mention figure skating? You and I have seen men bellow and beat their chests ape-fashion over the electronic trivia quiz down at the pub, I imagine.

True story--a chess journalist once overhead notable grandmasters Nigel Short and Yasser Seirawan gleefully discussing their plans to "TDF" opponents in an upcoming tournament. Short, a former finalist for the world championship, was asked what "TDF" stood for; he gave a cool stare and answered "Trap... dominate... fuck."

She [the sorely vexed Dr. Peters] said that when compared to a control group of male non-athletes, the hockey players scored significantly higher on questions that measured "danger as exciting." The players also scored higher on questions that suggested "violence is manly" and other categories which indicated that players had developed callous attitudes towards sex and accepted interpersonal violence as a way to solve conflicts.

Summary: male hockey players are more masculine than a control group containing gay male drama students! Stop press! Their suggestion that "violence is manly" could simply reflect a suprising degree of acceptance of and exposure to feminist literature, of course, in which case we'd have to throw that tentative hypothesis out the window.

What bothers me is that hockey really does have a dark side, and none of this dumbstruck cavilling at rudimentary facts of biology really comes to grips with it. Canadians know this, and accept it, though perhaps with private misgivings which it may be shameful to admit before an audience consisting of 50% Americans or more... For every prairie kid that makes the NHL, there are five who neglect good educations for intensive training and are undone by growth hormones, injuries, neurology, or--dare I use a phrase reflective of classical masculinity?--lack of guts. We habitually separate promising players from their parents for junior clubs just as they're starting high school, throwing their fates into a roulette wheel of callous coaches and inattentive foster families. Others earn collegiate scholarships, get hurt, and suddenly find themselves stranded at 19 or 20 without either a "full ride" or a life plan. The longtime presence of homosexual predators in minor hockey blew up into a 1997 scandal whose effects are still being felt; perhaps worse still are the sexual attitudes--Peters has a point here!--learned in team-bus liaisons with wide-eyed hockey groupies. And those guys who do make it to the bigs can look forward to being half-crippled, toothless, and extremely ill-suited for workaday life after hockey, even if, by some miracle, they've managed their income wisely.

All this we tolerate, as parents and policymakers, because it gives us a higher standard of hockey than they enjoy in Belarus or Kazakhstan, for the moment. It's a rational social choice, but the costs that weigh in the scale against the benefits aren't discussed much publicly. Which makes discussing them intelligently, on the occasions the subject arises, all the more critical.

I hope people aren't coming back here looking for actual Oscar-nomination commentary. I couldn't really stand to revisit my mounting nausea at Chicago's puzzling slide towards acclaim... it's a lean year indeed when a second-rate musical and the brutally flawed Gangs of New York are Best Picture nominees. Spielberg had two movies this year that were both better than either of these, and I'm not even such a big Spielberg fan.

In fact, let's be honest here: I kind of despise Spielberg, most of whose directorial oeuvre could have been entitled Children in Physical Peril, Parts One Through Twenty-Four. Sure, occasionally the "child" is a robot-boy or a clairvoyant fish-girl, but that just shows you the lengths he has to go to to conceal his favourite schtick. Technically the Frank Abagnale character in Catch Me If You Can was a minor throughout most of the proceedings, but the business at the end was so wonderfully, almost self-consciously adult, it felt like a gust of fresh air. I guess the reason we keep going back to Spielberg's movies is because he knows his limits. He's never going to try remaking Smiles of a Summer Night, or pushing any proposition more nuanced than "Nazis are bad." Knowing your limits is a very rare virtue, and yet I still have that dread walking into a Spielberg movie; after Jurassic Park II I'm never going to be able to shake it.

This is shaping up to be a slightly odd morning. I'm making calls to Switzerland, for that Big Switzerland Piece I mentioned a few weeks back, and it's requiring me to live in the Swiss time zone for at least a couple of nights, not that I wasn't sort of doing that already. Moreover, the Oscar nominations start hitting the street at 6:30 a.m. local time (5:30 Pacific), so there'll be a constant trickle of news from that, and you'll probably get to hear me complain some more about Chicago. Incidentally, if you're a Swiss reader, or can convincingly feign expertise on Switzerland, drop me a line. The more (information and perspectives), the merrier... I'd have asked sooner, but, y'know, I didn't want to go down that Rich Lowry road. Anybody who knows the prime number immediately following 19, e-mail me!

Ron Ziegler, Richard Nixon's press secretary, has died at 63. Whenever these old Nixon hands die, I find myself thinking "Well, if he was Deep Throat, we'll know soon enough." But Ziegler's death does not narrow the field. He has already been ruled out on very strong evidence--namely, that Throat, whoever he was, broke up Bob Woodward in the parking garage by doing a dead-on Ziegler impression.

This is the sort of detail, I imagine, that has Josh Marshall (and others) convinced that Pat Buchanan was Deep Throat. You can imagine him at the centre of that scene, doing a sadistic impersonation for Woodward's benefit and actually getting a laugh with it. Not exactly Alexander Haig's style...

You can now be the first on your block to own the immediately recognizable yet badly mangled latex "face rip" from GWAR's Live in Antarctica video! The first on your block, I says! Hello? Is this thing on? TAP TAP TAP *feedback* I'd bid for myself, you understand, but HOLY GOD--A HUNDRED AMERICAN DOLLARS? For a ruined stage prop that probably smells like a diaper? Yeah, I know, I wish I had the money too.

There was another classic "Ouch" moment for Canadians yesterday when Colin Powell pointed out that half of China's foreign aid goes to North Korea. Wait a minute... China hands out foreign aid? Sure, why not?--it's got its own space program and it's hosting the 2008 Olympics. Of course, this all raises the question why China is itself the fourth largest recipient of foreign aid from Canada. (It has apparently dropped out of third place.) Yeah, it's a Canadian Alliance talking point--go ahead and sue me for plagiarism. I really just want to know if the Chinese channel our tax money directly into the North Korean missile program, or if they skim a little to pay the board bills of "political maniacs".

Phil Spector, trapped in his own mystique and delusion for forty years, (allegedly} crosses the line and commits murder at last. NASA, desperate to cling to the novelty and glory of space exploration, sends seven scientists and pilots to their doom in a filth-encrusted orbital jalopy. Q: Can Tom Wolfe be stopped before he kills again?

I'm kidding, but others may not be. Check out this quote from Heather Havrilesky's Salon piece about Spector, uploaded Saturday:

According to [Kurt] Loder, ex-wife Veronica Bennett suggested in a 1983 Channel 4 documentary that Spector's behavior may have been influenced by his press: "I think Phil was a very normal person at the beginning of his career. But as time went on, they started writing about him being a genius. And he said, 'Yeah, I am a genius.' And then they would say, 'He's the mad genius.' And so he became the mad genius."

This would seem to fling Lana Clarkson's corpse quite confidently in Wolfe's direction, since his 1964 magazine piece "The First Tycoon of Teen" was what first drove home Spector's "mad genius" image for the American public.

Incidentally, this seems like a good opportunity to add a word to my previous thoughts about Salon's quest for a "revenue model" that allows them to keep the population of Namibia on the payroll. (The opportunity is all the better, in fact, since fellow Salon critic Ken Layne has just cruelly encapsulated my entire being, or generously magnified it--not sure which.) I've done the Salon "day pass" thing, and what I notice is that, far from being annoying, it's sort of morally satisfying. Once you're finished viewing the Flash ad you're reminded that you still have to pay money to read, say, Lewis Lapham's contorted bloviations in Harper's.

The question remains: will it work? Salon has already been reduced, if that's the word, to running Flash ads for its subsidiary, The Well, in the "day pass" spot. I suppose the equivalent, in the magazine business, would be a house ad on the inside back cover. And in the magazine business, that's a sign about as encouraging as Kaposi's sarcoma. (Yes, in theory, an ad for a subsidiary might generate more revenue that you could get selling the space on the market. In practice, you always take the cash.)

Priceless stuff rattling off the AP wire from the Zeta/Douglas/Hello! trial:

Catherine Zeta-Jones said Monday that a sneaky photographer spoiled the afterglow of her wedding to Michael Douglas and violated her privacy with blurry, unflattering images. "The quality was what every bride would hate to have out there. It was cheap and tacky and everything I didn't want," Zeta-Jones testified...

Asked to be more specific about her objections, Ms. Zeta-Jones pointed out that Hello!'s photographers appeared to have gone out of their way to include "some crumbling, puffy-faced roué with a hyper-obvious hair weave" in nearly every shot of her. It took the judge several minutes to restore order.

In linking to that UPI round-up of the chaos within NATO, I almost forgot to highlight Joe Lieberman's comment:

Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., took a more conciliatory tone, saying he understood part of the reason for the rift [between the U.S. and the Franco-German entente -ed.]: the Bush administration's balking at the Kyoto global climate change treaty, the international criminal court and the abrogation of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia.

"I fear during the last two years our administration has not listened to Europe," said Lieberman, who has declared his presidential candidacy for the United States.

I've been predicting Lieberman victory in the Democratic presidential primaries, and while I'm sure we'll get the same dreck from the other suckers vying for the suicide mission (although I suspect at least some of them would prefer to finish second), these paragraphs really make me wonder. Kyoto, the ICC, and the ABM Treaty? If you added up all the Americans who are upset about even one of these things, you might just get to 10% of the electorate. In a national campaign environment, support for the ICC and opposition to missile defence (this with North Korea snarling like a rabid mongoose, mind you) have got to be third rails in American politics, unless you're running for Lord Mayor of Berkeley. Kyoto might be slightly more appetizing: casting American prosperity as a threat to Mother Earth didn't stop Al Gore from winning the popular vote, after all. (I get a real kick, incidentally, out of these Democratic economists like Paul Krugman with their managerial quibbles about G.W. Bush; they've got some excellent points to make--Brad Delong does, anyway--but we shouldn't forget what the other choice on the butterfly-shaped menu was.)

I think people have enough native suspicion of politicians, if not outright intelligence, to decode what Lieberman's saying when he whines that "I fear during the last two years our administration has not listened to Europe." ("I fear..."--the man really knows how to use that basset-like face of his, doesn't he?) Kyoto and the ICC are international agreements the U.S. hasn't ratified. Until that happens, these things are offers, not contracts, and they've been rejected by Congress, not merely the executive branch--so by saying "The administration has not listened to Europe," Lieberman really means that "The U.S. hasn't bent over for Europe." As for the ABM treaty, I believe it suffices to point out that the Soviet Union is history, not news.

The useful thing to notice about Lieberman's view that the U.S. needs to sign and memorize every piece of Euro-superstate bumfodder that whooshes across the Atlantic by pneumatic tube is that he is in fact speaking to Americans on behalf of Europe. (You could say he was merely justifying the ways of Europe to America, as an informed observer of foreign policy; but then we come back to his cute little "I fear", don't we?) Lieberman's devil's-advocacy reminds us that in many ways, what the balky European nations are seeking are not limits to American military hegemony, but an establishment of European moral hegemony. Or a reinforcement of the one they imagine to already exist.

Is it just me or are geopolitics getting a little crazy here? Until recently the continued unfolding of the New World Order was short on the classic, theatrical, holy-cow moments that occasionally characterized the Cold War--Khrushchev pounding his shoe on the table, Adlai Stevenson telling the Soviet ambassador not to wait for the translation, Reagan calling the Russians an "Evil Empire", that kind of thing. But now nerves seem to be fraying. I happened to catch TV footage of Joschka Fischer, that former denizen of socialist-revolutionary street gangs, shouting at Donald Rumsfeld ("Excuse me! I'm not convinced!") and I was, as the kids say, buggin'. "Whoa... time machine!"

In fairness to Fischer, he had prefaced his belligerent English-language finger-wagging with an acknowledgment that "We [the Germans] owe our own democracy to America." (One of many good reasons to take one's news in print form, and ignore the sound-bite parade from the electronic hearth.) But we can already see the day, and not far off, when such perfunctory self-admonitions are dispensed with; and in the meantime the debt Fischer mentions is being repaid in the curious form of diplomatic ambushes.

In fact, if the mere acknowledgment of such a debt is going to be the only form in which it is "repaid" any longer, wouldn't it be best for us to just agree that Germany and France are past their adolescence as functioning nation-states? It seems to have been decided that Western Europe's dominant powers, whether governed by right or left, are going to resist American hegemony. Their paying spastic homage while doing so isn't going to soothe the temper of the hawkish American and English publics, who carry a very different image of the Second World War in their heads.

Warning: jet lag makes George Clooney cranky.

BERLIN (Reuters) - George Clooney reacted with a stream of invective when a [Turkish] journalist called the American actor's latest film--the box office flop Solaris--"boring" after it was screened at the Berlin Film Festival. ..."You make a lot of films, do you?" Clooney asked rhetorically. "You make a lot of films yourself? Yeah, I'd like to see you make a film first before you get to talk about it. What a jerk!"

Careful, George! This guy may have been involved in the making of Turkish Star Trek!

Clooney's comment shows just how out of touch even the most accessible, sane movie stars can get. I can understand an actor wanting to live in a dream world where he is judged only by his peers, but on any planet this side of Solaris, this "I'd like to see you make a film first" business is indigestible effrontery. Hey, George, that big house you live in and those fancy cars you drive? This may shock you, but they were paid for by a whole lot of people who don't even know what a "key grip" is! Some of them even promoted you as Hollywood's supreme down-to-earth, twinkly-eyed male lead!

Maybe the people who work for Clooney should adopt the principle behind his tantrum... "Hey, Mr. Plumber, you spent two hours working in my bathroom and my toilet still won't flush!" Gosh, George, are you a plumber? Did you go to technical school and learn all about different pipe gauges? No? What a jerk! Have fun taking dumps at Jerry Orbach's place up the road for the next week or so!

Somewhere, of course, Roger Ebert is smiling: if an actor ever pulls this crap on him he just needs to whip out his screenplay for Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and he's golden.

I never saw Solaris, but the consensus does seem to be that it is surpassingly boring--although our Turkish friend may be the first person who has actually had the temerity to mention this in front of George. (No doubt Clooney's well-known posse of hangers-on keeps safely shtum on the subject.) Critics are usually happy to cut the makers of intermittently boring movies slack if they're ambitious or original, but Soderbergh's Solaris was an openly cynical attempt to Hollywood up the admired Tarkovsky original and the Stanislaw Lem source material. The intellectual content of the book was lobotomized and the bleak East European ending was dispensed with in favour of a cheery Edenic coda. It's reasonable to overlook the pacing of a big philosophical movie like, say, 2001. But if you overtly reject artistic motives and shoot straight for the bucks, how can you possibly be forgiven for ending up with a product that's still damn dull?

At least someone at Slate is reading my site. Within about four hours on Friday they bought and re-"printed" Joe Bob Briggs' Lana Clarkson obit (deconstructed here) and had the Explainer tackle the burning question "Why Do We Need Saddam's Permission To Fly Spy Planes Over Iraq?" (first raised here). I'll just go ahead and assume the cheque's in the mail!

One item I tried to turn into an entry, and then junked, was the spam I got this morning from Frederick's of Hollywood. Maybe some of you have seen this one--"Order your Valentine's Day gift now!" Deducting the shipping time, this would have given me all of four days, I suppose, to attain underwear-purchasing levels of familiarity with a single woman or transvestite. I'm on the case, fellas!

Frederick's has finally gotten around to attempting a brand rehabilitation after being pummelled in the marketplace for 20 years by Victoria's Secret. Of course, it's unfair to criticize Frederick's for being on the wrong side of that mismatch--few brands in the known universe have been better handled than V.S. (Lingerie fashion shows on prime-time network television? The hell you say!) I know what Victoria's Secret is, but keep it to yourself: the secret is that even if a man happens to be doing the buying, you're really selling the lingerie to a woman. Whenever I've happened on one of those catalogues, I've never been able to look at it without having the creepy feeling that a girl must somehow be looking over my shoulder. The Victoria's Secret models are gorgeous and underattired, certainly, but above all they look comfortable, contented, and not at all self-conscious. In a nutshell, that's the company's real product. It doesn't really sell underwear, any more than The Body Shop sells nice-smelling things or O and Rosie sell magazines.

Clearly, the TorranceWatch has boomeranged on me in the form of massive karmic writer's block. On a day when getting out of bed would have seemed like an achievement if I hadn't spent the rest of the day regretting it, I wrote and tore up two weblog entries, Torrance-fashion, after trying to make of them something more than another link to a depressing news item followed by a plaintive cry of "Oh, for God's sake." Then I watched the Oilers lose 3-0 on "Hockey Night in Canada", which, let me tell you, didn't exactly put the whole "Oh, for God's sake" thing to bed. It was a grim, sluggish, "Oh, for God's sake" kind of game.

The mailbag is full of accounts of left-handed male cats, the most credible of which, to me, is my sister's reminder that she used to call our family's cat Max "Lefty" because his handedness was so pronounced. Doh! Should have remembered that. Also, everybody seemed to enjoy my diary of being phone- and furnaceless. As indeed you were meant to. But do you mind if I feel a little resentful anyway?

Today's National Post had an interesting cover story on the many uses of realtime brain-activity imaging. It is extremely relevant, I think, to my previous discussions of the use of brain images to transform or reinterpret aspects of personality into "neurological disorders". Brad Evenson's article contains heavy doses of hype, and possibly even a morsel or two of tripe, but it doesn't just glide confidently past the philosophical dimensions of new medical imaging (and drug) technology.

In an unrelated, yet somehow similar, bit of political grandstanding, we have Vancouver mayor Larry Campbell putting forth the doziest idea ever (text from a Vancouver Sun article by Karenn Krangle and Peter O'Neil):

Campbell said Wednesday that photo radar could be brought back as a way of stopping street-racing. "I said that's one of the tools we should be looking at," he said. "It's just a thought on my part. We should be using all of our resources to stop the carnage on the streets."

The provincial government eliminated photo radar in B.C. in 2001; premier Gordon Campbell, no relation, continues to describe it as a "cash grab". Mayor Larry undoubtedly ventured the idea with the most honourable of intentions, and with no greed for photo-radar cash whatsoever pulsating in his heart. But he seems frightfully ignorant of the actual epidemiology of "street racing", which is killing Sunday drivers by the dozen on the Lower Mainland. The street racers are, overwhelmingly, rich, ill-supervised Asian youths--ones whose parents are often living in some other country entirely. That's how they come to be racing tricked-out nitrous-enhanced cars on your streets in the first place, Mayor Dipshit. Do you honestly think a fine, imposed through the mail, is going to deter either the Fast or the Furious? Well, B.C.'s solicitor-general doesn't think so, which makes the question moot. But the answer was revealing all the same.

So Elinor Caplan is giving our customs agents pepper spray, bulletproof vests, and batons. What fun! In the CP version of the story, one agent sounded like a kid in a candy store:

"It's great news," said Eric Lupien, a spokesman for the Customs and Excise Union, which represents 11,000 members, including 3,800 customs agents. "They're going to get the training and the tools, that's brilliant, that's beautiful."

More from New Scientist--a discussion of whether a domestic cat, somehow magically enlarged to tiger size, would regard humans as prey. (A: it depends.) But what startled me was this categorical assertion:

Male cats are right-pawed.

Male cats are right-pawed? All of them? Cecil Adams dealt with this subject in '92: not only did he not mention a sex bias, but the research he discusses showed that a majority of cats sampled were left-handed. "Dogs are never cynical, except etymologically," John Derbyshire said recently; I suppose we must add that cats can be sinister in both English and Latin.

On an empirical note, I'll add that I don't need to test my own cat: I'm pretty confident he's right-pawed. Often when I'm at my desk, like I am now, he will come up beside my chair and tug at my sleeve in a bid for attention. If I bend my head down, he'll also reach up to my face in an apparent effort to do the old "Got your nose!" gag. (I know, however, that this endearing behaviour is merely a long con, and one day he really will forcibly carry off my nose.) To do all this, he steadies himself with his left paw and reaches up--invariably--with his right.

Just had a visit from my landlady's son, who lives in the city and is now, I'm told, officially taking charge of her properties. At 77, he says, she is starting to misplace rent cheques. On one level, this is easy to believe. Sample dialogue between me and L.S.:

ME Well, she always has been kind of, uh... [realizes he's painted himself into a corner]

L.S. ...spinny?

ME [Sheepish] Uh, yeah.

On another level, it's very difficult to believe. She puts me in mind of the (true) story about the ballplayer who was arguing with his owner, back in the reserve clause days:

OWNER You've got to understand, it's the principle of the thing, Jake. I have to think of my negotiations with the other fellows. Why, I'd sooner throw the $2,000 out that window than raise your salary by that much.

BALLPLAYER: Boss, if you threw $2,000 out that window, you'd still be hanging onto it when you hit the pavement.

That's my landlady--eccentric or not, she'd hit the pavement, without question. And she's certainly never lost any of my cheques--but 77 is 77. I've gotten a little more comfortable with her son over the years. He always struck me as kind of a hostile guy, somehow intense yet indifferent; I figured he regarded all tenants as swindling, slovenly cowards, which is two-thirds fair in my case. He's actually eighty percent reasonable when you get to know him, which puts him ahead of most landlords by roughly eighty percent, and his ostensive lack of amicability is attributable to horrifying injuries he suffered from falling off a roof many years ago. Staggering through life with a broken back would make anyone a little brusque.

Maybe the Ambler should have read this New Scientist article before going ahead with his redesign. Science never sleeps. (Via BoingBoing)

My oft-cited colleague The Ambler has completed an intense redesign, quarterbacked by the universally talented Dave Stevens. Perhaps the redesign is too intense? I report, you decide. Black, to paraphrase the Ambler's allusion to Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, is the colour of priests, anarchists--and Spinal Tap's Smell the Glove!

Speaking of intense, check out the Zevon-esque portrait of Newsweek's Ray Sawhill at his new site Wiggle Room. N-n-no, sir, I don't think I touched your Ducati, but I'm awful sorry if I d-did. Ignore his self-deprecating introduction and just start clicking the scrollbars on the left, because this is one magnetic, gifted culture writer. Why, I almost find myself wanting to agree with him about His Excellency John Ralston Saul. (But not quite.)

Nihil nisi bonum dept.: my site is down as I write this (1:08 am), and I'm taking a break from some needful chores. Unable to upload, I hit two of my accustomed hangouts, The Weisblogg and JoeBobBriggs.com. In a not-at-all-odd coincidence, both refer to B-movie queen Lana Clarkson, who got the press she Obviously Deserved All Along earlier this week when she apparently became the woman Phil Spector finally pulled the trigger on. Joe Bob wrote a masterly reminiscence for UPI:

In all of [her] movies, Lana was frequently, gloriously nekkid from the waist up. But she was conflicted even about that. One time she discovered some nude publicity stills of herself in a weekly newspaper published in the Bay Area. (She grew up in the Napa Valley.) Outraged, she stormed into Roger Corman's offices and demanded to know how they got there. Corman professed not to know anything about it, marched with her to the publicity department, and forced the hapless publicist to explain himself. ...Since most of Lana's counterparts in the business were born exhibitionists, I'm sure Corman was taken aback by a woman who was actually embarrassed by her own nudity.

In the hands of the skilled obituarist, Lana's "conflictedness" becomes charming. You can take the girl out of the small town, etc. If you restore Lana to life in your imagination--and I'm hellbound on the next express for pointing this out--you realize that the anecdote actually suggests she was a hysterical hypocrite who behaved singularly rudely to the man responsible for her career. Indeed, as a consequence of this Gedankenexperiment, one can't help wondering if she "stormed into" Spector's sanctum at a particularly bad time.

I hope no one will think I mean to--even implicitly--defend Spector, who was known to be profoundly vile long before the regicide of the Barbarian Queen. Her official web site is playing an animated Lana montage over top of a clip of Steely Dan's "Peg". Yikes!--this choice of music seems to hit uncomfortably close to home, with its Dan-patented funky mournfulness and its almost subliminal stabs at celebrity obsession and the hollowness of fame. Then... the shutter falls.

And so the TorranceWatch, after 77 days, recedes into history.

Carla Smithson, who went on medical leave from the Report and will eventually be coming back to an entirely different magazine, poses this brainteaser about marijuana law:

If the [regulatory] law has been thrown out, doesn't that mean that there is now no law allowing medical marijuana, and so the old illegal-to-possess law is in effect--thus [bringing] the police within the rule of law?

I had to work this out very carefully from the legal record before I came up with the answer. It goes like this: in July 2000 the Ontario Court of Appeal struck down the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act prohibitions against marijuana possession. This didn't create a hempen free-for-all, because they delayed their "declaration of invalidity" for a year to allow Ottawa to create a regulatory regime for pot that would pass constitutional tests. Two weeks before the deadline, in June 2001, the feds introduced new "Marihuana Medical Access Regulations". Can you believe those squares spelled it with the 'h'?

It is those regulations that the Ontario Superior Court of Justice has now thrown out, and since the validity of the CDSA depended on those regulations meeting a constitutional test, simple unlicensed possession of marijuana in Canada really is legal for the first time--but wait! In a twist not mentioned by Susan Ruttan or the cops she interviewed, the Superior Court's order does not come into force for six months. (The cops are thus on the right side of the law--but do they know? Or care?) It's another delay intended to let the feds try, try again. Until July 13, those unconstitutional federal pot regulations will remain in place, and you'll have to--under the letter of the law--have a federal license to toke up.

There's a certain hypocrisy here, though I hesitate to bring it up because these judges are ultimately doing a good thing, morally. Courts keep smashing down federal marijuana laws because the individual rights and medical needs of the citizen are more important than the social goal of restricting marijuana use. Superb! Inspiring! I couldn't agree more! But if they really think those things are important, why do they keep building time delays into their rulings?--because they fear the social consequences of decriminalizing marijuana use? Hey, Judge, didn't you just finish telling us that it was more important to let patients have access to pot? Why not, y'know, go ahead and do it?

I'm a bit busy for heavy weblogging just at the moment, but maybe Kirk Marlow's ties will keep you amused in the meantime. Kirk is the proofreader at the Magazine Now Known As Citizens Centre Report, though his main occupation is lecturing on art history at a community college. And collecting ties!

If you haven't read it, you should probably look at Daniel Pipes' account in the National Post of the hoops he had to jump through to deliver a speech at York University in Toronto. The police did a good job of protecting him--and, thereby, protecting the scruffy remnants of freedom of speech in Canada. The sad part is, he needed the protection, because violent Muslim-leftist gangs will control our campuses unless we turn them into mini-police states.

The venue had been locked-down for 24 hours before the event. Admission was severely limited. Only students could attend and they had to pick up tickets the day before. At the gymnasium they showed identification, then went through a gauntlet of metal-detectors and friskings. A hundred police officers, some 10 of them on horseback, hovered ubiquitously, tensed for trouble. Substantial parts of the campus were blocked off. As for me, several bodyguards took me through a back entrance to the gym and sequestered me in a holding room until I entered the gym.

Not content merely to stick up for constitutional principles, the cops had to remind Pipes that he wasn't in Kansas anymore, or indeed any other self-respecting and free place.

...surely the most memorable aspect of this talk was the briefing by James Hogan, a detective in the Hate Crime Unit of the Toronto Police Service, to make sure I was aware that Canada's Criminal Code makes a variety of public statements actionable, including advocating genocide (up to five years in prison) and promoting hatred of a specific group (up to two years).

Canada: where, if the rioters don't get you, the fuzz just might!

After an incredible 77 days, Kelly Torrance's weblog remains hostage to her insecurity and laziness. She confessed to me earlier tonight that she intends to attend a weblogger party in Washington, D.C. on Thursday night, but she's no longer sure she qualifies, and fears that if she tries to enter the premises, she will be held up to general ridicule.

Now, me, I would shrug off any such uncertainty on the old Groucho Marx principle. I won't join any "web community" that will have me as a member! But Kelly is a notoriously sensitive flower. I have therefore deputized her to attend the party as my personal representative and proxy plenipotentiary, with full authorization to use my weblogging credentials as needed. This will allow her to pretend she doesn't even have a site, though I don't mean to discourage anyone from making fun of her if the occasion seems appropriate. She has promised to behave as I would, insofar as possible. Attendees may wish to carry mace, pepper spray, or a Taser.

If seniority counts for anything, the long-enduring conservative website Enter Stage Right, edited by Steve Martinovitch, has NRO's Corner and everybody else beat all to hell. Now the output of its writers is being collected by space-age filters and posted to the web in convenient weblog form. It's surely very unfair of Jim Antle, though, to initiate yet another McCarthyite inquiry into Jeremy Lott's family tree. First retrograde Uncle Trent, now gender-bending Cousin John... hasn't J-Lo suffered enough?

[UPDATE, 11:24 pm: Since he's a former contributor to the Report, now rechristened Citizens Centre Report, I put the ESR weblog under Steve's name in the "co-workers" section of the sidebar. Consider it a clumsy solution to an impossible taxonomic difficulty.]

I've received another advance notice of a service interruption from my web host, the very credible and civilized Edmonton-based Tera-Byte. (Yes, the hyphen is somewhat odious, perhaps especially in a Metricated country, but I suspect the domain terabyte.com was long gone when they started up.) ColbyCosh.com will be inaccessible for "up to three hours" between 1 a.m. and 7 a.m. Eastern time February 7. Adjust your very lives accordingly.

From the inbox, this Edmonton Journal item by Susan Ruttan, dated February 4.

Minor physical conditions from writer's cramp to colour blindness are enough to qualify now for home delivery of medical marijuana--with no doctor's prescription needed.

This is one colour-blind professional writer who's never felt more patriotic!

A year and a half ago, the federal government passed regulations saying medical marijuana would be available only to people with a serious illness, and only with a physician's permission. Such legal restrictions appear to have wilted. Three weeks ago, an Ontario judge declared them unconstitutional.

Police disagree and local suppliers remain careful, although some provide pot on recommendations from practitioners such as massage therapists. Mark Johnson, a 29-year-old Edmonton entrepreneur, is entering the field with his new Canadian Compassion Club.

Law talkin' guys are welcome to disagree with me here, but as I see it, what we have is an anarchy bounded by only the thinnest remaining membrane of objective law. In principle, Parliament and the legislatures are still supreme on those Constitutional questions subject to the famous "notwithstanding clause" (for the American readers, that's a rarely-exercised legislative veto allowing some individual rights to be suspended, explicitly, where a statute conflicts with them). On questions not subject to the clause, or in the vast majority of situations in which it isn't exercised, the courts rule. A simple system, perhaps even a laudable one (probably not, but that's a whole nother essay). But as the marijuana muddle reveals, someone forgot to implement a good means of giving direction, or feedback, to the people who enforce the law. (That arrests may be overturned much later, after homes are invaded and lives interrupted, isn't what I'd call a "good means" of behavioural feedback.) The marijuana statute isn't coming back unless the notwithstanding clause is invoked, which it won't be. It must be regarded as being off the books. And yet no one's told the cops to regard it that way--the responsibility, I suppose, belongs to the provincial justice ministries, and why should they be expected to give the order? They didn't ask to have the status quo stirred up by a court challenge. The courts, to paraphrase Stalin, are like the Pope: how many divisions does Chief Justice McLachlin, or the Ontario Court of Appeal, have?

As a result, the cops are a gang. This is not all their fault, but what else but a gang would you call a heavily armed force that's not answerable to a controlling legal authority? And if the cops are de facto a gang, are we not morally entitled to regard them as one? More and more, this is how civilians do regard the police in Canada. That the cops willingly accept some traditional or habitual restrictions on their conduct is really beside the point: the Mafia has a code too. And the Mafia at least offers "protection"; Canadian cops simultaneously treat property crimes as bureaucratic trifles while discouraging armed self-defence and helping to promote policies, like the new firearms law, which further discourage it. These leaves citizens without even the "protection" they might provide for themselves.

I'm sure on some level the cops are frustrated by, and trying to deal with, the problem of whom they are answerable to, and how they can respond to Charter rulings which otherwise just lie there like a dead fish. It would help a lot, though, if they would recognize the hidden anarchy (often not well hidden) in our society. This would mean taking a grown-up approach to it--first, by getting out of the anti-self-defence mindset, and second, by taking the most liberal view of victimless crimes where possible. Your energy is needed to preserve basic social order, gentlemen, not to persecute the harmless.

[UPDATE, February 6: I've now taken a closer, more detailed look at the law which suggests that the cops may have stumbled onto the right policy, for now at least. Have a look!]

[The following was written at my house, February 5, 2003.]

12:47 am The cab driver is garrulous and skilled, and speaks good English, not that I have any very powerful prejudice against the bad kind. He's taking me home after a long day at work so I can see if my house has (a) heat and (b) telephony. I should like very much for it to have both, which is conceivable. Before I left my rented house, I had fidgeted with the thermostat, which sometimes brings the stubborn furnace to life. Sometimes, it seems, when the house is altogether chillier that it should be, you have to, counter-intuitively, turn the heat down to trick the furnace into roaring to life. So I'd tried that. I'm not worried about the cat thriving in conditions of 10° Celsius; I'm more worried that the furnace will get overenthusiastic and broil him. And while I was at work, the phone company called to say that everything was fine, as far as they could tell, right up to the threshold of my house. Perhaps my phone service had spontaneously regenerated in my absence.

Broken things, your parents tell you, don't just fix themselves. Ha! In my experience, complicated mechanisms, left alone or cajoled, will quite often fix themselves. Perhaps, I think in the taxicab, it will be so with my furnace and my phone. I've got two chances at having a half-decent day; I'll be happy, I think, if just one thing--either the heat or the phone--has started up again. Pay whichever species of repairman I need to pay, and consider it some kind of lesson learned, or whatever. It's not like I don't already know that machines will fail simultaneously so as to create maximum inconvenience.

Steely Dan comes on the radio, and the cabbie and I talk about Fagen and Becker, rock's twin hermit literary purist geniuses. The cabbie tells me he's got every Dan record on vinyl. Even the new one, Two Against Nature? No, not that one. I don't have it either, so that's a conversational dead end. Unfazed, he starts confessing to less civilized tastes. The glories of early Chicago are extolled. Fine, at least he's not into the Peter Cetera shit. Then, just before our destination, he hits me with Rickie Lee Jones. Aw, jeez, what? I'm not gonna be able to sleep now, knowing that some Rickie Lee Jones fan has command of an automobile on my city's streets. Just another occasion when you think that Hitler had the right idea but went after the wrong people.

I get home, pay the guy, tip him well--mindful of the many weird and shameful relics in my own record collection--and go inside. No phone, no heat. The house is a fridge. Not a freezer, which is good, plumbing-wise; and anyway it's well above zero outside. But this needs solving.

2:20 am More fidgeting with the thermostat has proven unavailing. OK, this is your last chance. No? Fine, then, I'm calling the veterinarian. I break out the Yellow Pages. This is the kind of thing I'd normally look up on the Internet, but there is no Internet, not for me. Nothing but a cell phone and a radio, really; I'm like some ham operator after the Apocalypse, only with none of the secret glee such a person would doubtless feel over his sudden empowerment. I'm just cold, solitary, and pissed off. Also, in my absence, the cat's knocked over the dregs of a Wendy's Biggie Coke. Well, fair's fair: I left him alone in the cold house all day. Even though you have fur, I think in his direction as I mop the spill, I'm willing to be generous and consider us even. Of course, we're not anything like even: I rescued him from an animal shelter, and it's been months since he paid his half of the rent. But then again the SPCA was pretty well heated.

The lady on the other end of the emergency furnace hotline is kind and understanding. Her on-call service professional is going to call me. But when? Soon, I hope, suddenly extra aware of how cold it is. I spend the next little while rehearsing apologies for my housekeeping. With a little tidying, I hope I can cross over the line between "schizoid recluse" and "W.H. Auden". I'd heard that W.H. Auden kept a really messy house, with, like, uneaten meals piled up all over, which is way worse than anything here. And he was one of the great lyric poets of the 20th century! So, you see, it's not so bad. I turn my oil paintings so they're facing the living room; that'll help him clue in that he's dealing with a creative type, who can't be bothered with trifles like discarding pizza boxes. I sure hope the repairmen know who W.H. Auden was.

I decide that, whatever I say to the furnace guy and the phone guy, I'm not going to say "I'm sure you've seen worse, ha ha." Because what if he goes "No, actually, I haven't, this is the worst ever. Twenty years in the biz, you take the prize"? I couldn't handle that.

3:58 am Heard nothing from the On-Call Service Professional. I call Kind and Understanding Lady back, mindful of the ghastly hour, hoping her phone isn't next to a sleeping toddler. Kind and Understanding makes some calls, and discovers that her On-Call Service Professional appears to have pulled a Captain Oates in the grim Edmonton night. I can understand that. I'm feeling rather Robert Falcon Scott-ish my own self.

Kind and Understanding recommends another service, whose practically identical dispatcher tells me that another On-Call Service Professional will be calling shortly. This time, the cell phone really does ring. I'd begun to think it might have caught some kind of telephone HIV from my inert land line.

hi this is barry you paged me

Barry is quite a contrast from the twin dispatchers. Barry does not sound at all happy to be on duty at four in the morning. The problem--no heat--is explained to Barry.

afraid the best i can do is send someone by at eight thirty, nine o clock

Then your best is by no means "Barry" good, I think. Not Barry good at all. "I suppose," I say, "I am in no position to argue. I'll wait." I decide to get under the covers until morning breaks. These rough notes and our dead bodies--mine and the cat's--must tell the tale, if anyone sees fit to chip through the ice and upload them (the notes). Though more likely any such adventurer will find my dead body, half-eaten, with the cat standing by, looking very satiated indeed.

7:55 am Speaking of Hitler, the house is now in what we call the "Unethical Nazi Hypothermia Experiment" stage. Apparently extreme cold causes teeth to chatter and noses to lose all sensation. Always glad to suffer for scienz. A kind and understanding dispatcher, the third in seven hours--or possibly the first one over again, not sure--wakes me with a call on my cell phone. What make is my furnace? Is the pilot light on? Has the extreme cold fractured or otherwise damaged my Visa card?

The pilot light is on, all right; this is the one fact even I know how to establish, sometimes, about a furnace. I know it's on because I went down in the basement and peered through the grill, realizing with a sentimental start that that desperate little blue soldier was the only thing providing heat of any description to the house. (That and some light bulbs, a computer heat sink, my armpits--it's a ragtag army of BTUs fighting a losing battle.) The cat's efforts to create a spark by vigorously rubbing his claws against my furniture--or at least I assume that's the idea--are touching but probably futile.

Without the Internet, I have to get my morning news from the CBC. Damn, have you heard about what this George Bush character is planning in Iraq? He wants to kill babies for oil or something! I didn't even know you could get oil from babies!? Is that the deal with baby oil? What a messed-up country the U.S. is! And don't even get me started on the Canadian Alliance's pro-hate agenda! A vote for those guys is like shooting a gun at your gay neighbour! And just because he's gay, not because he plays that Judy Garland Sings Lerner & Loewe album loud enough to wake the dead!

8:55 am The furnace guy, a friendly blur (don't have my contact lenses in), says that the problem is a blocked frabblegrammis which put too much tension on the zetzenderfer, causing it to smagmate [sp?]. Duh, like I didn't know that. He more or less suggests having whoever installed the furnace tried for attempted homicide and third-degree cretinism. This seems a bit harsh, as the illiterate Filipino orphan my landlady doubtless contracted to do the work may not yet have reached the age of legal majority. Indeed, under English common law the tyke may still be doli incapax. "If that's Latin for 'head up ass', you're probably right," the repairman agrees. What a nice fellow--it's so rare to find classically trained help.

He's gone now to retrieve a Lennox-certified zetzenderfer ($140??) from the shop. So I'm still cold, without Internet, and, with my contact lenses out, blind to boot. (I could put the lenses in, sure, but I have this superstitious fear of inserting frozen things into my eyeballs.) But it could be worse: in just a little while I'll also be a couple hundred bucks poorer. Technically I suppose my landlady should pay for this repair, but I'd prefer to avoid calling her attention to my criminally low rent, which hasn't flinched through six years of skyrocketing property values. Besides, with natural gas prices at the current level, I'll probably come out ahead from having the furnace off for a day. In fact, is it too late to ask the guy not to replace the busted part...?

9:33 am We have heat! And I'm broke. But we have heat! Not only will I never take heat for granted again, I'll never even take the concept of taking things for granted for granted. What other pleasures of civilization am I failing to appreciate sufficiently? Hot water from a tap! Nicotine! Deodorant! Corn shavers! Telephones!

...oh, right.

I've got no E.T.A. for the telephone man: he could turn up anytime. But waiting will be decidedly easier in a warm house. The furnace guy didn't seem to think there was anything sinister in my phone and heat conking out simultaneously (not to mention the mysterious shovelled walk, which appears to be a random act of kindness--great, now I suppose I have to "pay it forward"; thanks a million, Mr. Good Samaritan). When I mentioned my phone problems, the furnace repairman actually paused for a moment and studied the big metal fixture thoughtfully. "No," he said, "I don't think there's any connection between your phone and your furnace." It was almost like he had to check his internal knowledge base first, see if there was an entry for "telephones" under "T".

I'm supposed to be writing a long piece about Switzerland for a special issue of the new Citizens Centre Report. Without the Internet, I am forced to rely on my previously existing knowledge of that country. Let's see...

Purveyors of the bitter-tasting cold remedy Ricola, the Swiss have been the lederhosened enigma at Europe's heart for hundreds of years...

Hmmm, no.

Reclining on couches of the purest Nazi gold while they chatter oafishly in as many as 18 different European languages, the beefy, decadent, neutral Swiss are magnificently positioned to provide mankind with that long-sought solution to its quotidian troubles: a common enemy...

Tempting, but scarcely on point. I can see that literary flash alone isn't going to yield 2,400 usable words.

9:55 am The telephone guy checks in, blessedly early. He says he's fifteen minutes away. An end to my house troubles is, at least theoretically, in sight. I can't wait for things to warm enough up for me to get a shower in relative comfort. I suspect the cat can't wait either. He's real friendly as long as you still smell better than, or exactly like, a dead mouse, but after that things start to get tense.

10:23 am The phone repairman really looks the part--exactly like a guy who graduated from blue-boxing to working for The Man about 20 years back. He seethes with sudden anger when he sees the row of telephone accoutrements bolted to a beam in the basement. "I don't like to see this," he says, tapping a little beige plastic box with a screwdriver. It's something I'd never noticed before: it's got an old Northwestern Utilities label on it. That's why you never see the meter reader anymore--they've hacked directly into your phone line, and a microchip calls the company every month to report on your utility usage, presumably in a soulless singsong sequence of unforgiving 1s and 0s. Is this something everybody just sort of knows--that the gas company basically has a tap on your phone? Did I miss a memo?

Despite the phone guy's instant hostility to the beige box, it's not the problem. There is, in fact, no live phone signal at all being fed into my house. "Good news for you," says Captain Crunch. "There's no charge if the problem's on our end." But the jury's still out. Over the next twenty minutes the Captain climbs a pole to study the local junction box, scoots down, comes back, rummages in the basement a little more--having found a hitherto unrevealed second physical line into the house--then goes back outside again. I find myself beginning to hope that he may be right, and that the problem really is on the outside of my threshold, leaving the phone company on the hook for the cost of the Captain's considerable labour. Surely too much to ask? And anyway, if he just plain lied and told me the problem was inside the wall rather than outside, how could I possibly rebut him? I start to kick myself for my suburban softness, without even ever having lived in a damn suburb--but then I remember that even Fred Reed is helpless to use exert the magic of chewing gum and baling wire upon a networked technology like a phone line.

Anyway, I recognize competence when I see it, and I have the same confidence in the Captain that I did in the furnace man. It's really pretty amazing how lively and cheerful these guys are (excepting Barry, and that was four a.m.)--it almost convinces me that real work isn't a thing to be feared. Almost. Anyway, the Captain's probably in the union and makes thirty-five simoleons an hour with two months of stress leave every year.

He comes back in, again, and goes back out, again. He's leaning more and more towards the hypothesis of a bad splice on the outside, close to the pole. Apparently it has the motive, means, and opportunity to sever my contact with the world. The house is warming up nicely, though with all the coming and going, not nearly so fast as it might be. The Galileo thermometer on my desk, which needs dusting, refuses to acknowledge that the indoor temperature could possibly be as high as 16° Celsius yet. I nonetheless undo the buttons on my cardigan. Do I dare to eat a peach?

11:16 am Triumph! Captain Crunch has successfully located and repaired the worn splice. He leaves practically before I can thank him--eager, perhaps, to leave the W.H. Auden Theme Park behind and return to his orderly Telus truck, which probably smells a bit less like car exhaust, on the whole. I pick up the phone and hear a dial tone--placating, apologetic; under the circumstances, almost operatic. The lights on my DSL modem go green across the board. The chimes of MSN Messenger are heard once again in the rapidly warming Cosh household. All shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.

Dear reader: I've thrown you a few tasty bones, so now I am going to home to assess the state of affairs there, and await a telephone/ADSL repairman, if one proves necessary. This site may not update until Thursday morning, or I may be back in a couple of hours. We shall see. Wish me luck.

A little while ago I asked why proceeding with U-2 overflights in Iraq would present a problem for the Bush administration.

Is there really any prospect of Iraqi air defence successfully bringing down a U-2? ...apparently U-2s have overflown Iraq with impunity at other times in the post-Gulf war era. So why doesn't the president just send in the planes? If the Iraqis won the lottery and actually shot down a UN-sanctioned surveillance overflight, wouldn't this be a perfectly satisfactory casus belli?

To my surprise and pleasure, this provoked an e-mail response from a reader who has some knowledge of the aforementioned aircraft. He has asked not to be identified.

First, let's accept the fact that Iraq routinely fires surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) at U.S. aircraft patrolling the no-fly zone. The aircraft they shoot at are fighters--fast, highly maneuverable, packed with anti-missile equipment (chaff, flares, jammers, etc.), and they stay at the outer limits of the SAM envelope.

The U-2 is neither fast nor maneuverable. When it is within a SAM envelope, it's a sitting duck. Anti-missile equipment is good, but it's not designed to protect a sitting duck; it's designed to protect a fast and highly maneuverable aircraft while it gets the hell out of Dodge.

...[The U-2 is] a high-altitude aircraft. But it was visible on radar in the 1950s when Gary Powers was shot down. Radar is much more powerful today. It was barely out of reach of SAMs in 1950; that was 40 years ago and no longer the case. In an overflight, it almost certainly will be within range of some Iraqi SAMs and a dead duck if Saddam decides to scratch his itch to shoot.

The U.S. doesn't fly suicide missions. A U-2 overflight, without ironclad guarantees, would be. Now if we still had operational SR-71s, it would be a different story.

The design-revamped Report arrived in the office today, complete with new title. The magazine is now called Citizens Centre Report.

Q: What the heck is the Citizens Centre?

A: It's the non-profit company that now owns what used to be the Report, and, before that, Alberta Report (or B.C. Report, if you lived in B.C., or, in some parts of the country, Western Report) (and, before all that, it was called St. John's Edmonton Report, or, if you lived in Calgary, St. John's Calgary Report). The company's full name, unless something has changed while my back was turned, is the Citizens Centre for Freedom and Democracy. The Citizens Centre will continue to publish the same old "right-wing" magazine that a few of you, and thousands of others, know and love. But it's also going to be branching out into pro-liberty activism and research, as fundraising allows.

Q: Why aren't you providing a link to the Citizens Centre?

A: I'd love to. There's no website yet. I guess nobody here knows how to code one. As you can tell, I sure don't. I can give to a link to the guy who did the redesign of the magazine, though.

Q: So it's really the same magazine, more or less, as the old Alberta Report, known more recently as just the Report?

A: Enh. They're trying to change it by baby steps. We were habituated to breaking news, as a weekly; that's really what the magazine was 20 years ago, you know--an independent weekly newspaper, in a magazine format. Now that it's a fortnightly, and there's this Internet thing we're all up against, the magazine has to slide into more of a National Review-ish role. And they're trying to make the thing less of a dismal wax museum of social and political horrors. If you're any kind of conservative, or libertarian, or even just half-aware, a week's worth of unleavened Canadian news will leave you choking to death on pure bile.

But yeah, it's the same magazine. Same size, same staff, same issue frequency. I'm still in it, and that's what counts around here. The convenient image at upper right will give you an idea of how to find Citizens Centre Report on the newsstand. (Good luck with that--our newsstand distribution stinks.)

Q: Why no apostrophe in "Citizens"?

A: Because I'm not in charge around here, that's why.

Via BoingBoing: a sneak peek at the sorts of exam questions you can expect, should you be so perverse as to wish to become a Canadian citizen. Warning--there are traps, like this one:

23. Which group of people were important in the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway?

My first thought was "The investors!", which I'd like to think the judges would accept; "the engineers" would also be a good answer. But the politically correct answer they're looking for is pretty clearly "the Chinese", who laid track and toted dynamite on the CPR's B.C. sector. I suppose it's just as well immigrants are exposed, early on, to Canada's twin traditions of class warfare and ethnic hypersensitivity. Only victims are "important", you see. Victims--and trees:

44. List three ways in which you can protect the environment.

[Plucks jaw off floor] No joke, folks: riding the bus to church and recycling your pop bottles is now officially considered a qualification for Canadian citizenship. Judging from this list of sample questions, it's pretty much the only one, in fact, which has nothing to do with understanding the history, institutions, or geography of Canada. Immigrants to Canada are not asked questions like "Give an example of unethical practice in the conduct of a small business", or "Is it ever proper to use violence to settle a religious dispute?", or "Under what circumstances, if any, is public nudity appropriate?" But they may be asked to list ways they can "protect the environment." Does this curiosity not imply that our government considers "environmental friendliness" to be, literally, the highest moral law? If anyone still can't bring himself to believe that environmentalism is a religion (and, in Canada, an established one at that), here's Exhibit A.

Confusing message from Paco Francoli in The Hill Times on Prime Minister Chretien's campaign finance scheme:

If the bill is adopted in its current form, the major parties will receive the following amounts each year: Liberals: $7.9-million; the Alliance: $4.9-million; the Bloc: $2.1-million; the NDP: $1.6-million; and the Tories: $2.35-million.

This would especially benefit the Alliance which only managed to raise $4.7-million in 2001. Meanwhile, the Liberal Party raised $12.4-million, the NDP $97,500, the Tories $1.4-million, and the Bloc $63,500 last year.

But since Paco is hypothesizing that the Alliance stands to "especially benefit" from the bill--which may be true, given that it has the broadest base in the category least affected (individual contributors)--maybe it should have been mentioned that the Alliance opposes the bill. Here's the official Alliance position:

Replacing an addiction to corporate and union funding with an addiction to taxpayer funding is not the answer. The Canadian Alliance is opposed to direct subsidization of political parties. Any public funding of political parties must be tied to voluntary donations coming from individuals. The bill also provides for no limits on donations to politicians' personal trusts--this is a big loophole, which would allow individuals, corporation and unions to circumvent the new donation limits.

The unintended consequences of this law will be vicious. Assuming that it becomes law. And assuming, for that matter, that the consequences are unintended.

Apologies for the brief absence. When I got home last night, my telephone and DSL were out, my furnace was working very badly if at all, and... my walk had been shovelled. I don't know what it all means. Some elaborate prank? Or did the busy subterranean workmen who've been dinking around on my block for months finally cut my gas and phone lines in one disastrous swipe, and then shovel the walk by way of "apology"? The phone company says there's nothing unusual going on in my area--well, I think this qualifies as unusual. And did I mention that a plumbing and heating service company had left an advertising flyer in my mailbox, as if they knew something was going to happen? What the hell's going on here?

Unwelcome Advice Dept.: the Canadian Chiropractic Association is opposing plans to lower the age at which body-checking begins in Canadian minor hockey from 12 to nine.

"It's a move I think they should reconsider," said Dr. Greg Stewart, CCA president. "Boys who are aged nine, they don't have the skill development to take a proper hit or to give one. They don't have the stability, they don't have the balance in the skates and they definitely don't have the muscular strength."

Stewart is concerned about long-term damage to growing bodies and injuries that might not show up until later in life.

Stewart thus stands obstinately in opposition to the findings of a three-year controlled study that showed no additional morbidity from allowing young children to body-check. My understanding was that chiropractors have embraced science now and have abandoned the entirely quackeristic origins of their art. But perhaps I'm wrong. (Since I was so quick to take credit for Canada in the matter of the cell phone, I suppose we have to take the rap for the origins of D.D. Palmer, who first "discovered" that spinal maladjustments were the cause of literally all disease.)

My feeling about opposition to letting young kids body-check is this: what the hell do these do-gooders think nine-year-old kids do with the rest of their time? I never played minor hockey: the unpatriotic truth is, I never learned to skate in more than the most rudimentary way. I can assure "Dr." Stewart, however, that there was no shortage of body contact in my life. Between noon-hour games of rugby and King of the Hill, it's a positive wonder my school didn't manufacture quadriplegics by the disabled-accessible-busload. But perhaps some of my classmates grew up to be frequent chiropratic patients (there is, after all, hardly any other kind).

Let's just replay Stewart's objection to youth body-checking one more time:

Boys who are aged nine, they don't have the skill development to take a proper hit or to give one. They don't have the stability, they don't have the balance in the skates and they definitely don't have the muscular strength.

This is, in fact, an excellent summary of the reasons for lowering the age limit. Under the old policy, we were teaching kids to skate at thirty miles an hour and then turning them loose to hit each other. The idea behind the change is to teach the players to keep their heads up while they're still too young and pliable to dish out much damage. How is it helping their "skill development" with respect to body-checking to start them on it later? The best answer the Canadian Hockey Association has come up with, after conscientious study, is that it isn't helping.

[UPDATE, 12:42 p.m.: Except the study wasn't conscientious! Reader William Adams fact-checked the proverbial ass of the aforelinked Citizen story, and notes that the author of the CHA study was found to have made a horrendous math error and was forced to retract his conclusions about injuries.

After being interviewed by the CBC, Professor Montelpare later recalculated his numbers. He found that, far from there being fewer injuries in the body checking group, there were nearly four times more. In year two for example, he found 8.6 injuries per 1000 Athletic Exposures in the body checking group, compared to 2.1 injuries per 1000 Athletic Exposures in the non-body checking group. In a supplemental report, Professor Montelpare told the Canadian Hockey Association that he now considered the differences between the groups to be "significant".

The quote comes from CBC's "Disclosure", which has the tale of the tape, and relevant links, here. There's also some CBC Sports coverage of the débâcle. Maybe Montelpare should have had a chiropractor check his math...?]

Seen in the inbox:

Shawn-Patrick Stensil, co-ordinator of the Campaign for Nuclear Phaseout, said most of Europe is either non-nuclear or plans to phase out nuclear power.

I guess his parents named him "Shawn-Patrick" because one name just wasn't Irish enough, dammit. Mr. Stensil gave this tidbit of information to the Calgary Herald, where it appeared on Friday. His claim is part of a full-court press against the proposed construction of a nuclear reactor in Alberta's north that would provide electricity to the Western Canadian market and steam for the drainage needed to separate crude oil from bitumen in the Athabasca tar sands. I wrote about the proposal for the magazine last week so I don't want to pre-empt myself by going into too much detail, but it's basically a flanking action against Kyoto. "Worried about greenhouse emissions? Fine, then--we'll turn up the nukes."

And why not? Well, because there are still questions about the true economic viability of nuclear power in that setting, questions which are being studied right now. Everything presumably depends on what kind of deal the AECL, Canada's Crown corporation for nuclear energy, wants to offer. The AECL has a design for a new generation of CANDU reactors but it can't sell anything until a demonstration facility gets off the ground somewhere. (A Sierra Club spokesman correctly notes to the Herald that CANDUs don't have an especially good history or reputation--by the unique standards to which the nuclear industry is held.) The idea is presumably to build the showpiece reactor for the Ft. McMurray area at a discount.

If the bottom line works, nuclear steam power would represent a giant step for the tar sands towards fulfilling the Kyoto greenhouse targets our federal government, in its infinite wisdom, has signed up for. (Right now steam for tar sand separation is produced by burning natural gas.) Unfortunately, provincial politicians are failing, spectacularly, to realize they have a trump card in their hand here. Premier Ralph Klein gave an astoundingly stupid quote late last week to the effect that whenever nuclear energy is mentioned, he thinks of "Chernobyl and Three Mile Island." Presumably hydroelectricity also makes him think of Vaiont, and chemical refining, of Bhopal. Thanks for playing, Ralph, and please accept a copy of our "I Am An Ignoramus" home game. Meanwhile, environment minister Lorne Taylor is wondering, with less scientific illiteracy, what we would do with the spent fuel. A good question, but the answer's not especially hard, in principle, so why don't you wait and see what the feasibility study actually says about that issue?

Maybe we could sell the spent fuel to environmentalists. James Lovelock, who originally came up with the hypothesis that led so very many hippies to name their children Gaia, has said he'd be thrilled to take it off our hands:

I can envisage somewhere about 2050, when the greenhouse really begins to bite, when people will start looking back and saying: whose fault was all this? And they will settle on the Greens and say: "If those damn people hadn't stopped us building nuclear power stations we wouldn't be in this mess." And I think it is true. The real dangers to humanity and the ecosystems of the earth from nuclear power are almost negligible. You get things like Chernobyl but what happens? Thirty-odd brave firemen died who needn't have died, but its general effect on the world population is almost negligible.

What has it done to wildlife? All around Chernobyl, where people are not allowed to go because the ground is too radioactive, well, the wildlife doesn't care about radiation. It has come flooding in. It is one of the richest ecosystems in the region. And then they say: what shall we do with nuclear waste? Stick it in some precious wilderness. If you wanted to preserve the biodiversity of rainforest, drop pockets of nuclear waste into it to keep the developers out. The lifespans of the wild things might be shortened a bit, but the animals wouldn't know, or care. Natural selection would take care of the mutations. Life would go on.

I have told the BNFL, or whoever it was, that I would happily take the full output of one of their big power stations. I think the high-level waste is a stainless steel cube of about a metre in size and I would be very happy to have a concrete pit that they would dig--I wouldn't dig it--that they would put it in. ...One [purpose] would be home heating. You would get free home heat from it. And the other would be to sterilise the stuff from the supermarket, the chicken and whatnot, full of salmonella. Just drop it down through a hole. I'm not saying this tongue-in-cheek. I am quite serious. They would be welcome to take pictures of my grandchildren sitting on top of it.

(Via Bourque) Well, it's terrible what happened to Columbia, I spent a whole day thinking, but at least here's a news story that seems impossible to craft a conspiracy theory about. Right...?

...wrong. Along comes André Balogh of Imperial College in London:

16 days ago, a piece of protective foam was seen to have come loose as the shuttle left the ground, striking the shuttle's wing. The damage done to the wing, said Prof. Balogh, was "just there and waiting to destroy Columbia". The flight, he said, "was doomed from the launch". ...Pressed by Jeremy Thompson, Prof. Balogh said he was satisfied that NASA had been fully aware of the problem and had, in all probability, known all along it was potentially fatal.

Stubborn Hungarian! When a clever television interviewer tries to lead you into defending an untenable proposition, don't follow him! That the damage done to the wing on liftoff resulted in Columbia's destruction is, at the moment, presumptively true. But that several dozen mission controllers conspired to suppress the knowledge, knowing that an attempted return from orbit without adequate shielding would spread toxic debris over Texas like butter on toast? Gosh, Prof. Balogh, where do you come by such a bitter view of scientists? Oh--you are one.

As so often happens the SkyNews report requires us to do extra research to discover Prof. Balogh's actual credentials. (Thanks again for lowering the tone, TV!) As it turns out, they're pretty strong:

André is a Professor of Space Physics. His research interests include the heliosphere and the Earth's magnetosphere as Principal Investigator on the Ulysses and Cluster missions, as well as planetary magnetospheres and magnetic fields as the first advocate for ESA's BepiColombo mission to Mercury.

Wait--he's in the pay of the European Space Agency? Looks like there's no love lost between the ESA and NASA. Which shouldn't be surprising; NASA continues to possess the remnants of a "national greatness" mandate, and to advance American military interests in space, while the ESA exists to promote the peaceful use of space--and, frankly, to deny the Americans a monopoly on the void. The destruction of Columbia could even be regarded as a supporting case for the ESA approach, a point that will probably be made in the coming days, though quite without Prof. Balogh's casual and preposterous accusation of callousness. (The ESA's media relations folk are no doubt gritting their teeth at his faux pas.)

If it's Friday, they must not want us to notice the press release... I almost missed the news, long anticipated in Canadian journalism ranks, of Ken Whyte's levitation out of the National Post editorship. (Here's the official announcement.) The enigmatic one, long said to be invisible at NatPost HQ in Don Mills, has been named to the new position of "deputy publisher" and will also serve as "senior advisor, baseball operations".

Over the next six weeks, Mr. Whyte will attend an executive development program at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business before assuming his new duties in mid-March, Post publisher Peter Viner said in a message to staff.

So the country's finest domestic editorial talent is going to be taught to count beans, is that it? I've heard that accounting is as much art as science, but this takes the principle much too far.

I do miss the time when I was able to point out that our warring national newspapers, the Post and the Globe, were both run by refugees from Bumfuck, Alberta. (Whyte got his start as a sports reporter for the Sherwood Park News; former Globe editor Bill Thorsell is a grandson of displaced Vikings from a town called New Norway.) Mostly I pointed this out to myself, of course: I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Bumfuckian. Contemplating this petit media monopoly gave me--what was that thing called again? Oh yeah: hope.

A fun experiment: go to CBC's "About CBC" page, find the heading "Corporate Facts", and select "Media Accountability" from the pull-down menu.

Acid reflux (sponsored by the good folks at Häagen-Dazs™)and an unsleeping cat conspired to wake me up at about 7 this morning. I tried to go back to sleep to the soothing sounds of CBC 1, but they had to (dammit) go and pick this time to play some interesting stuff--a little feature on a forthcoming Calgary production of Orff's Catulli carmina, followed by some mind-blowing arachnid playing by Dave Brubeck. Maybe I'll make up the lost sleep when the NHL All-Star Game starts later on. The one advantage of waking up so early is that I get to watch World at War on Access at 10. Gosh, A&E must have produced like a million hours of programming on the second war, and none of it ever quite came up to the quality of that one series.

I had no trouble falling asleep in the first place to CBC 1's overnight programming; I remember listening to Deutsche Welle's "Asia Mailbag", a classic case of German, All Too German if there ever was one. Basically this charming show consists of two Germans (they were named Jim and Eileen this time out, but somehow they had slight German accents anyway) answering weird, grovelling letters from South Asian listeners who brush up their English in radio "listening clubs". I conclude from this that there are Pakistanis and Bangladeshis walking around sounding like Werner Klemperer. But why don't they just listen to the BBC World Service? I'm slightly nervous that this has something to do with admiring the historical track record of Germany. One correspondent wrote in to ask "What is the capital of Germany?", which made me glad of living in a town with good libraries, even if my first brief instinct was to anticipate the answer "Bonn". (In some respects age is the enemy of learning.) All the readers' questions for Deutsche Welle were fielded with terrible, even oppressive gravity, the humour of which might well have been partially intentional. Or not.--Remember the scene in the movie Ridicule where the aged experimentalist tries to explain the English concept of hioum-ah to a table full of French wits?

Later there was more news, or the same old news over again, about the Columbia disaster. I found myself thinking about the "Faster Feiler [sp?] Principle"--which states that the Internet has vastly increased our ability to absorb news, especially bad news--sometimes cited by Mickey Kaus. Kaus doesn't mention the FFP this morning, but does have a typically fresh take on yesterday's events.

I was feeling some despair and mild rage, as I'm sure many Canadians did last night, about our public broadcaster's various truculent takes on the shuttle news. The CBC actually does its best, I'm sure, to avoid the appearance of bias. But that's precisely the problem, isn't it--spending your energy avoiding the appearance. When a newsworthy catastrophe happens, the on-air personalities can't help delivering honest reactions, and you're suddenly reminded that however unbiased MotherCorp may pretend to be, there's probably not a single Canadian Alliance voter drawing more than about $50,000 a year from it. No, not one. Where would such a person come from--a journalism school? Ha bloody ha.

What I want to know is, would CBC's insinuations of American "arrogance"--not yet denied by the network, it seems, despite now having appeared in the Daily Telegraph under Mark Steyn's byline--have been forthcoming if a Canadian had been on board? Those "arrogant" Americans had made room for two Canadians on flights scheduled for later this year. On the whole Canadians seem quite eager to enlist in space travel efforts, and CBC seems perfectly happy to make national heroes of them once they've returned. Of course, with our unique moral virtue, no doubt we Canucks belong in space. Indeed I pray every night before bed that the first television broadcast an extraterrestrial civilization decodes will be the comforting dome, and the placating basso profundo, of Peter Mansbridge. Doesn't humanity wants to be represented at its finest?

The story: modern cellular phones are celebrating their 20th anniversary. The compelling detail: did you know they were invented by a Canadian and developed and field-tested right here in Alberta's oilpatch?

The added value, courtesy of ColbyCosh.com: as the aforelinked Globe piece mentions, a Calgary company called Novatel was a key player in the development of early cell. The R&D was partly funded by the Alberta government, so just as soon as I get desperate enough to put a PayPal button somewhere on the site, I'll be expecting heavy karmic contributions from those of you who have cell phones. And don't scrimp, either: in the mid-1980s Don Getty's provincial government got the bright idea to "diversify" Alberta's petro-based economy by means of massive investments in, and loan guarantees to, promising private companies. Novatel was the big winner, and we taxpayers were the big losers--to the tune of $646 million. This in a province with (at the time) about two and a half million people, you understand. However, it may have been a small price to pay for the permanent discrediting of state capitalism in Alberta.

(Link via BoingBoing.)

Jonathan Hendry writes in with this thought on Fumento's ADHD piece and my response to it:

ADHD people have been shown to have a slight, but real, difference in brain volume. ADHD people's brain volume is slightly smaller in certain areas. (The brain can still be larger than average, but certain areas are 3%-4% smaller than they would be expected to be.)

There was some speculation that this was due to the stimulant meds, but a recent NIMH study showed that isn't the case.

A 10-year study by National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) scientists has found that brains of children and adolescents with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) are 3-4 percent smaller than those of children who don't have the disorder--and that medication treatment is not the cause.

There's lots, and lots, and lots, and lots of research on ADHD; it's a bit much to expect to see it all in TNR, isn't it? It's TNR, it's not the Lancet.

"MRI remains a research tool and cannot be used to diagnose ADHD in any given child, due to normal genetic variation in brain structure," noted Rapoport. "The measured influence of ADHD on brain volume can only be discerned statistically across groups of children with and without the disorder." [Emphasis mine]

The authors do propose that "Symptoms appear to reflect fixed earlier neurobiological insults or abnormalities," but apparently these are "insults or abnormalities" which are undetectable in any individual case. What we've got here is a correlation, not a cause. That's clear, isn't it? At a dramatic level, a difference in brain morphology might qualify as a disorder, if you can show that the difference itself doesn't result from some confounding factor. Maybe children who are disciplined in a certain way, while very young, have different patterns of brain growth. Or maybe the change in brain development is caused by a virus--in which case the disease interpretation will have won. Brain pictures don't, by themselves, win the argument.

In light of this, Jonathan's snippy comment about me not "googling" for this study is rather much. I specifically disavowed global expertise on the subject of ADHD, in such a way that no one without ADHD could miss it; I was strictly responding to Fumento's article, which did, after all, make rather bold claims to put ADHD skepticism to rest on its own merits. (Why would anyone have to search the Web for "actual evidence" after reading the article? Wasn't presenting the state of the clinical evidence the purpose of the article? If Fumento's piece is admitted to be useless in this respect, how does the fault lie with me?) That's something I don't think it can accomplish, and if this NIMH study is the best support out there for a disease interpretation, it's no wonder.

Big problems for legendary Oilers GM/coach Glen Sather, who has been forced to put on both hats for the Rangers after Bryan Trottier became one of the worst, most embarrassing flameouts in the history of NHL coaching. ESPN correspondent Barry Stanton can see the end coming for Slats. Dry Cold is following the story. It's certainly not a new one to Oiler fans, who will remember Sather's ill-fated experiment with Bryan "Bugsy" Watson behind the bench in '80-'81. Sather turned his young team of destiny over to Watson, who promptly went 4-9-5 with it. Slats had to step back behind the bench after six weeks. Later, for part of '93-'94, he put in another coaching stint when he just couldn't be bothered to find a proper replacement for Ted Green. Then he handed the squad to George Burnett, the head coach of the farm club, leaving everyone to wonder why Burnett hadn't been promoted immediately. Well, we found out. Burnett lasted 35 abominable games and was axed in favour of Ron Low, who muddled through for a few years but certainly wasn't any kind of Scotty Bowman, as New York fans learned when Sather brought him to Madison Square.

So, in a sense, Austin is right to say "Historically, Sather's best choice for coach has always been himself." This is a polite way of saying what Edmonton fans already know, and the rest of the league is now discovering: Sather lost a step as a GM years ago. For the first five years or so of Oiler NHL history, he was responsible for what is probably the finest record of talent acquisition by an expansion team in any North American pro sport. But for years under locally loathed owner Peter Pocklington, Slats didn't pretend to do anything but follow orders, keeping expenses low to stretch out his hunting buddy's march toward bankruptcy. When Sather was let go--his heart wasn't in the "small market" thing anymore after Pocklington folded up shop and fled the city--the change in Edmonton was like a sudden, dramatic venting of pollution. The team started communicating with the public and outlining specific plans for small-market success.

I'm not sure I have a record of it, but I was very skeptical that Sather was going to be able to get back in first gear after he made himself a featherbed of Ranger money. It's not so easy to make those clever trades before the deadline when everybody regards you as the league Croesus. Maybe things will improve for the Rangers now that Slats has a chance to exercise the one skill we aren't certain he's lost: his talent as a motivator. Personally, I suspect that hockey players, like most adults, are either self-motivated or not motivated at all. Sather's down to the last ace in his hand. By this time next year I expect him to be running the Lightning or the Flashers or the Wildebeests, one of those expansion clubs I can't keep track of. (Is there really a team called "Mighty Ducks" or did I dream that?)

Vancouver freelance journalist Jay Currie is conducting a little experiment. The issue to be decided is whether a CBC3 mention will bring more hits than a BlogAd on Matt Welch's site. I think you'll find the BlogAd is slightly more effective, Jay, but how come you had to pay money for me to find out about you? If you'd just thrown up some links to other Canadian weblogs, we'd have noticed you in our referrer logs and started sending traffic your way a long time ago. That's how this works! Jeez, and I thought my instinct for self-promotion was inhibited... (I know, I know. Please don't e-mail me to tell me I've overcome those inhibitions magnificently.)

The reason I went AWOL this afternoon while other webloggers were breathlessly keeping up to the minute on the shuttle was that I had already stayed up through the night and by 3 p.m. I was in a purple haze... I was going to upload this unrelated entry just as I got the news, so I tucked it away. It should still be fairly fresh fact-wise. -ed.

You sometimes hear criticisms of the effort made in the United States to pretend that college athletes are uncompensated for their play. Expect those criticisms to be torqued up several notches by the startling news about high school basketball phemon LeBron James, who has been sidelined by officialdom after accepting some free jerseys from a clothing store. I understand the desire to keep money out of high-school sport, but this seems like a tricky business indeed.

Is LeBron's mother allowed to give him presents? Well, we know the answer to that one: young James already got off the hook after she gave him a Humvee. (Incidentally, if I played a sport which involved a lot of trash talk, I would never accept anything called a "Hummer" from my mother. LeBron's gonna hear about that one for a long time.) What if she owned a store--could she make a gift to him from the inventory? Yes, she could and did. So what if the gift-giver was his uncle? What if it was just an old family friend? I presume the Ohio school athletic commission has a table of acceptable degrees of consanguinity for cases like this. Subsection 5a: gifts from a "family friend" are acceptable if he is habitually called "uncle" by the player, but not otherwise.

But in the actual case at issue, the store's owner gave James the jerseys in exchange for some glossies they were going to hang on the wall. This has to count as extracurricular labour in exchange for fair consideration, doesn't it? I do hope James' representatives made that argument. If he'd been shelving shoes at the store in exchange for the money value of the jerseys, that would be OK, wouldn't it? If he had just worked as a "greeter" in the store, would they throw him out of high-school ball?

Still, I'm sympathetic to what the OSSAA is trying to accomplish, and it can make whatever rules it likes, within the limits of law, regarding who can play and who can't. The real nutty part here is this:

Although the 6'8", 240-pound James hasn't officially declared himself eligible for the [NBA] draft, Friday's ruling might prohibit him from playing in college because of NCAA rules.

Now this is extraordinary--not surprising, exactly, to anyone familiar with the history of amateur sport, but still amazing when you consider the implications. The NCAA is going to ban LeBron James for something he's done while not yet subject to NCAA authority. What we have here is a relic of the "gentlemanly" ethos of sport which appeared suddenly at the time North American athletes actually started to get paid. This ethos, in turn, was a holdover from pre-industrial attitudes to merchant activity: it is a relic of a relic. The fetish for "amateurism"--and it is appropriate to call it a fetish when one act of professionalism taints you beyond redemption--was greeted, and treated, with contempt by actual athletes almost the moment it appeared. Before the First World War it was already common for college athletes in any professionalized sport to take on assumed names and go make pocket money on the weekends; no one, to my knowledge, ever felt any shame whatever admitting to this after his career was over.

Look at it this way: when they took away Jim Thorpe's medals, they couldn't persuade other athletes to take them. They knew it was a mad and wrong thing. That, friends, is ninety goddamn years ago. Sure, maybe LeBron James was going to go straight to pro ball anyway, but I think maybe the NCAA is in danger of inviting a fight it doesn't really want. Let's hear their brilliant reasons for discouraging a young black man from getting a college education.

I was in the gymnasium of my school, at beginning of the noon hour, when I heard about what happened to the Challenger. I asked a collegial alcoholic teacher "What's new?" and he told me "Not much. The space shuttle exploded." I had a hard time believing him. Went down to the library and spent the remainder of the hour watching the same footage over and over. This morning when a friend IMed me with the words "Again with the shuttle..." I didn't need nearly as much convincing.

But in the ruminative aftermath, today's incident is a lot more baffling and unsettling. Shuttle launches are exercises in controlled ferocity. That ferocity got out of control, once. If you had to bet on a precise point in a shuttle mission at which things might go wrong, Challenger would have returned your money with interest. No greater contrast with the poetic serenity of a shuttle landing can be imagined. There is no forward propulsion applied to the craft when it's coming down. It's guided automatically by triply redundant software. A major structural defect in the airframe would have been noticed, surely, in orbit. It's a question of point and glide. So what went wrong? I don't expect a simple answer like the one Richard Feynman supplied so dramatically in the famous press conference. Speculation is focused on the heat-shielding tiles--the same tiles that became famous, a positive joke, when Columbia landed, after its first mission, with a few missing. Like disfiguring gaps in a set of perfect white teeth.

Much is being made, in the weblog world, of a claim that a CBC Newsworld interviewer questioned aloud whether "American arrogance" had had anything to do with this morning's accident. Disgusting if true, but I for one was almost equally offended by Adrienne Arsenault's repeated claims, on the main CBC network, that this incident will create "political problems" for NASA and enfeeble the American will to explore space. How little she knows about the United States. If history teaches one unambiguous lesson, it is the foolishness of underestimating America. I don't speak of "resolve" or "spirit": these are unsuitable words to denote the blind, guileless, elemental cussedness of an axe clearing a homestead, a pioneer crossing a salt flat in a thirty-cent wagon. For my part, I expect that the "arrogance" which sent the first free men into Earth orbit, and put them on the surface of a heavenly body, will be unblunted by these seven deaths.

Via Radley Balko we learn of a release date for A Mighty Wind, Christopher Guest's next movie with the Guffman Repertory Co. April 16, for folks in the inner ring of civilization. Maybe a few weeks later for your Red Deers and your Thunder Bays.

Now, here is the thing; sometimes a movie comes out, like The Royal Tenenbaums, that you're 90%, 95% sure is going to be really good. With Guest, McKean, Shearer, Levy, Willard, and Balaban doing a mockumentary on folk music, we have a case where the probability is, simply, 1. There isn't any way this movie's not going to be hilarious.

Plus Ed Begley plays a Swedish PBS producer. It's the role he was born to play, isn't it? Now that I think about it, it just seems like Ed's been going through life playing Swedish PBS producers disguised as other people. Now God be thanked who has matched him with his hour...