Now here's a contrarian exercise for you: I'm going to argue that Glenn Reynolds needs more Web traffic! A case of taking coals to Newcastle, you say? Without doubt; but there's a puzzling paradox in my traffic stats and I'm wonder if other people have noticed it.

The god-emperor of weblogging saw fit to include my site (Serving Pedantry and Petulance Since 2002™) on the streamlined blogroll at his MSNBC page. A very humbling honour. To venture a statistical hypothesis, it seems to me that, ceteris paribus, if your site is on blogrolls on two pages receiving equal traffic, you should get more hits from the short blogroll than the long one. Sounds logical, right?--people are surely more likely to follow a link from a list of 25 than from a list of 150+. Yet, around here at least, the evidence is that the Instapundit blogroll still has more pushing power, by a factor I'd estimate at around 2.0-5.0, than the GlennReynolds.com MSNBC blogroll. (I can't make accurate observations at the moment, because my Instapundit referrals are coming from an entry there, not the roll.) My best guess as to the meaning of this is that Instapundit is still receiving a lot more visitors, perhaps a full order of magnitude more, than GR.com.

You can imagine confounding effects that could account for this phenomenon, the main one being that the Instapundit blogroll might be seen as an important feature of Instapundit.com, while the GR.com blogroll may be dismissed on sight or regarded as slightly perfunctory. It's certainly possible. But the GR.com blogroll is more visually prominent on its page than the Instapundit blogroll, and if people aren't paying attention to Reynolds' personal winnowing of the weblog world's elite, why aren't they? All right--my bias is showing. I'm still surprised that the ratio of Instapundit blogroll power to GlennReynolds.com blogroll power is significantly greater than unity. Isn't MSNBC supposed to be, y'know, a media empire? Aren't there supposed to be synergies going on here?

If you're a Glenn Reynolds fan, you should make a point of visiting his new site, for several reasons: (1) the paycheque represents his first recompense for the free editorial labour he's been putting into the original site; (2) this is not your father's Instapundit--the entries are proper columns and he's tackling new subjects; (3) I'm asking you to do it, not just for the selfish reason that the prof promotes me occasionally, but for the way more important selfish reason that high-profile transitions from weblogging to paying journalism should be encouraged in general. And did I mention that you should definitely be buying a trial subscription to the L.A. Examiner?

I tried to go to bed and sleep; Lord knows it's what I want to do most in the world right now. But I found myself lying there, composing, in my head, this weblog entry. I've learned from experience that it's best not to struggle in those situations. You've got to wake up and put the words on the page; no sense tossing and turning.

So. Our subject is Michael Fumento's New Republic piece on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder--the Disease Formerly Known As Attention Deficit Disorder Or Hyperactivity, Depending On What Diagnostic Criteria You Used And What Year It Was. I won't attempt to summarize the piece, but the peg for it, clearly, is that the most famous debunker of medical myths in our time finds himself on the side of the angels, for once, instead of playing devil's advocate. ("A Liberal Hoax Turns Out To Be True" is the subhed.) ADHD has been a flashpoint for conservative/libertarian criticism of the inappropriate medicalizing of ordinary human behaviour. Fumento, in defending the widespread practice of prescribing Ritalin to hyperactive children, is conscious of momentarily stepping outside the lib-con camp. The exercise is fascinating.

One feels immense trepidation in questioning Fumento's framing of a medical issue, in this case or any other. I have no meaningful expertise on the subject of ADHD: and, please, read that twice. But I do have some points to raise.

· Fumento writes:

Many conservative writers, myself included, have criticized the growing tendency to pathologize every undesirable behavior--especially where children are concerned. But, when it comes to ADHD, this skepticism is misplaced.

I think this is a decidedly unfortunate statement. Under what circumstances, exactly, is "skepticism" of this sort ever "misplaced" outright? You may believe, and Fumento goes on to try and show, that the skepticism is unsuccessful at overthrowing the evidence; but you can't reasonably expect people to abandon the actual skepticism. The skepticism is not misplaced; it could not possibly be more appropriate than in a case of feeding drugs to millions of children on the grounds that they have a suppositional mental disorder. Fumento knows this; the hand of a frisky TNR editor may even be to blame for the locution.

· This quote from Mona Charen left a pretty sour taste with me:

"I have two non-ADHD children, so it's not a matter of parenting technique," says Charen. "People without such children have no idea what it's like."

In the first part, Charen appears to be contending that parenting technique can't possibly have anything to do with ADHD, because hers is perfect. In the second part, an appeal is made that sounds very familiar indeed; it is the cry that is instantly raised against Fumento himself when he points out, say, that there is no evidence for the existence of any such thing as Gulf War Syndrome. "You don't know! You haven't lived with the screaming, the fainting, the diarrhea, etc." Didn't Fumento recognize that he was indulging, by its inclusion, a debating tactic he loves to pour scorn on?

All that said, I should add that I have no data about Charen's "parenting technique"--which is my point. While she is openly inviting speculation here, I'm sure she really is a great mom. Children do come into the world with the rudiments of a personality; parents have a large, but limited, ability to form them as people. But that's not relevant to the central question.

· And that central question, to me, seems to be "ADHD: trait or disease?" When people say that "ADHD doesn't exist" they aren't really saying there are no hyperactive, distracted children in the world. They are challenging the "disease" identification. Similarly, the opposite camp is challenging the "trait" identification.

And when we're dealing with the brain and the mind, we are best advised to recognize that there is, in fact, a gray area here. Fumento argues for a neurological interpretation of ADHD, or at least adopts one partway through the piece, without (herein) presenting very good evidence for it. We are provided with a picture of brain scans of a "normal" child working out a math problem and an ADHD sufferer doing it. The image is suspicious on its face, because it shows different coloured blots mapped onto what appears to be the same brain. But never mind that: my question is, why wouldn't we expect to find evidence of different operations taking place in the brains of people who were merely, and acknowledged to be, different only in personality? The pretty brain pictures can't settle the semantic issue unless there is actual evidence of a defect, or deficit, or damage, on one side. I'm sure that when a child with a 160 IQ tackles a math problem, it "looks" different than when a child with a 100 IQ does it. In principle, there must be some neurochemical distinction involved. Yet no one suggests that the child with the 100 IQ has a disease or disorder. Should we?

· To take the semantic distinction a step further, note the attempted reductio ad absurdum by a psychology professor, quoted by Fumento:

"Half of all medical disorders are diagnosed without benefit of a lab procedure," notes Dr. Russell Barkley, professor of psychology at the College of Health Professionals at the Medical University of South Carolina. ..."Such a standard would virtually eliminate all mental disorders."

Well, pardon me for bringing it up, but if you're going to make a big show of tackling libertarian and conservative critiques of ADHD, shouldn't you maybe mention the most famous libertarian psychiatrist alive--Thomas Szasz? How can you credibly go into this territory without meeting Szasz, or at least mentioning him? I'm no adherent of the pure Szaszian doctrine that mental illness doesn't exist, but the doctrine is there, and it is influential amongst lots of people who don't subscribe to it in toto. I am mystified that the argument "Most mental disorders are diagnosed appropriately, therefore ADHD is diagnosed appropriately" would be allowed to stand. Both sides of the comma are surely vulnerable.

· The part about the silly proposed laws against schools recommending Ritalin fits as narrative with the rest of the article, definitely, but it is disconnected logically. You could believe that ADHD is real and common, yet believe that such a law was a good idea. You could believe that ADHD is wholly imaginary, yet believe that such a law was a bad idea. I wouldn't want the legal issue to be excised from the piece, which is a list of "myths" for a general readership, not just a polemic. It's still beside the central point.

· Fumento deals with the illicit trade in Ritalin and attempts to reconcile its street reputation with the appropriateness of administering it to children. He does a good job of this, too. But I have a short wish list. I'd like to have seen some mention of the large and growing number of adults who have been prescribed with ADHD, and who are being medicated for it. I'd like to have seen some mention of the positive social incentives one can receive from such a diagnosis; you can get extra time on some standardized tests like the LSAT if you have ADHD, for example. I'd like to have seen some description of the actual, and notoriously loose, diagnostic criteria for ADHD. I believe the psychiatric profession will admit that close study of a child's behaviour for an extended period of time is necessary to arrive at a true diagnosis--which, in essence, leaves the diagnosis in the hands of the parent most of the time, and not the doctor. And Fumento might have mentioned, while fending off claims that Ritalin is like cocaine or methamphetamine, that actual dextromethamphetamine (Dexedrine) is still sometimes prescribed for ADHD in Canada. Maybe this stuff is relevant, maybe it isn't. Since Fumento raised peripheral issues like the aforementioned legal proposals, I guess I'm claiming the privilege, here, of raising others.

· What I think about ADHD is that it's not important for us to reach firm agreement that it is all one thing (disease) or all another (personality trait). We see Virginia Postrel entering this debate, because she knows first-hand about depression and wants it to be characterized as a disease, an illness. I hope one can have full sympathy with the condition, and recognize its ferocious, life-inhibiting qualities, without necessarily agreeing on the semantic point. Ah, you say, but if some mental illnesses are mere "traits", then surely you wouldn't advocate using drugs to treat them?

Well, why the heck not? When we drink beer, self-"medicating" our personality traits is exactly what we're doing. I'm not silly enough to think that when I drink Jack Daniels or coffee, or smoke a John Player Special, I'm not altering my personality with a drug. Usually, at least when the cigarette is involved, the alteration is an improvement. Nicotine helps me cope with loneliness and despair I choose not to characterize as depression, and which, in fact, do not come close to meeting the arbitrary-but-necessary criteria for such a characterization. (I mean "arbitrary but necessary" in the sense that age limits on voting are arbitrary but necessary: there is no logical reason for choosing 18 years as a cutoff rather than 19 or 17, but there are overwhelming arguments that such a limit must exist. So it goes, I think, with many mental illnesses.)

In principle, I believe personality modification is the same kind of activity as treating an "illness" like ADHD or depression. Perhaps that's a Szaszian thing to say, I don't rightly know. The point is this: it's certainly OK to give Ritalin to some children. If it helps them, and they report that it helps them, and it makes them better human beings, and brings relief to their parents and teachers, then I don't really give a crap, at the individual level, whether a disease is being cured or not. But I do think there are compelling social reasons to discourage reinterpreting traits as diseases. (And to be honest, I strongly suspect there are compelling therapeutic reasons for it, too.) Yet we shouldn't let our reluctance to engage in this reinterpretation stop us from embracing drugs, where they can help us. To use an obvious example, I'm not bothered by the prospect of men using Viagra (unless you mean "prospect" literally--ew), but I'm bothered by the idea that we have to redefine normal human aging as illness to convince us it's OK to use Viagra. And that's roughly what I'd say about Ritalin, too, with the caveat that there is justification for the fear that feminized schools are trying to suppress biologically male, high-spirited, shit-disturbing behaviour. It's not so good to recommend an abandonment of skepticism to a parent who may be in that circumstance.

In essence I'm saying there is a middle position in the debate, rarely stated, and I think it may even be, by and large, where Michael Fumento really stands. But he took the opportunity to have a mildly sensationalistic go at his (many) lib-con buddies. Helpful? I wonder. It certainly made me think, anyway, and I don't respect him any the less.

Off to bed, then. Sorry if what I've said was tangled, or too strong, in places, but it's gotten the lightest editing polish I can get away with. I'm sure I've said ten or so things I don't really mean; if I have to take back an important one I'll let you know. Correspondence is, as always, welcome.

[UPDATE, February 1: A reader responds.]

I was talking about my weblog, on the way home from work, with Kevin Steel, and for some reason I happened to mention that I didn't expect I'd have to add too many bells and whistles to my hand-coded site. Approximate quote: "By the time XML/RSS becomes essential for weblogs--or indeed acquires any observable importance at all--I'm sure someone will have figured out a way to automatically translate my source code into RSS output. Figuring out how to add RSS to my site would be a source of great grief and annoyance to me, and of none at all to some clever coder. So I'll wait for that."

Approximate length of wait: five hours. Now that's Internet time! I just now discovered, by chance, that David Janes' Blogosphere is offering RSS feeds for the weblogs it "scrapes", including my site. If you want yours added, all you need to do is follow his instructions. You can view the Janesian RSS output for ColbyCosh.com even with a regular web browser. It's a bit clumsy: Janes' code hasn't learned to tell my entry titles apart from my body text. But that's a lot to ask, and I can't imagine who'd complain (plus it sounds like I could solve it myself with an HTML tweak--maybe I'll look into that on some day when I'm feeling customer-service-y). Some aggregators may only read RSS feeds, but I doubt any actual humans limit their weblog-viewing in this way. Thanks to David for the free benefit; I'll add the appropriate button to my sidebar shortly.

I got an Instapundit hit earlier today, and you know what that means. For some reason the tradition seems to be for me to sicken and repel new foreign readers by writing about hockey. Just wait until the men's curling playoffs start! You think I'm joking, but I'm not! I'm that living cliché, a Canadian who considers curling to be first-class entertainment! Curlers are like rock stars in this country! I look forward to explaining why the sport is so great!

The CBC is replaying a few classic hockey games late at night this week as a means of helping starved fans over the All-Star hump. Tonight's was a game that put the Wayne Gretzky legend in first gear, an 8-5 Oiler thumping of the Leafs in Maple Leaf Gardens from March 29, 1980. Gretzky had six points (2 G, 4 A) playing before a very friendly crowd, one full of people who'd watched him play junior hockey. (Leaf players who tried to run him quickly found themselves the target of a chorus of boos. They got over that fairly quickly when the Oilers started winning Stanley Cups.) It's a wondrous thing hearing CBC broadcasters explain Gretzky to a nation not yet intimate with the full dimensions of his talent. (It is perhaps even more wondrous to hear them leave dead air for seconds, checking the roster, when #11 gets the puck. Mark Messier, in 1980, is still far from a household name.)

Early in the broadcast we are warned that Gretzky is unstoppable behind the net, and even though the Leafs are just as aware of it as the men in the booth are, they are helpless, exasperated, and doomed. Gretzky cannot be contained by Borje Salming, a Hall of Famer who is repeatedly humiliated in this game; Gretzky cannot be contained, at this point in his development, by anybody. (The relentlessly ignorant, who say legendary goon Dave Semenko was the key to Gretzky's success, should note that "Cementhead" drew at most two or three shifts on this night, and none alongside 99.) Gretzky's first goal is particularly hallucinatory: given the puck in his "office" behind Mike Palmateer, he simply takes two steps and backhands the disc past the Leaf goalie, on the short side, without even looking at the net. Knowing that Palmateer has the fatal disadvantage of being human, Gretzky doesn't even have to check that the puck went in after he pulls the trigger. Ho-hum, back to the bench.

But while it would be easy to celebrate Gretzky in prose until the end of time, he had plenty of six-point games. Not so Don "Ants" Ashby, who played six games on Gretzky's line and had six points, including a hat trick, in the March 29 game. Afterwards, Ashby joked with his wunderkind linemate: "I've never heard of a guy getting three goals, three assists on Hockey Night in Canada and being named the second star." Gretzky still remembers the quip, though it was uttered longer ago, now, than Don Ashby's whole life lasted. (And Mark Messier's still in the NHL.) The big night couldn't keep Ashby in the league: he was in the CHL the next season and died on a bad road two weeks after it wound up.

Ian Buruma filed a farewell column in Tuesday's Guardian, explaining--in clear Buruman language anyone can understand--why he supports the U.S. and Israel.

There is much wrong with American society and foreign policy, and there are pressing reasons for attacking Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. That I chose to defend both countries none the less is because they still come closer to my definition of freedom than most countries, even if they fall far short of their own claims. Perhaps this is one reason why the Pinters, Paulins and non-Muslim liberals get so worked up: the hypocrisy; the fact that Americans preach freedom but manipulate elections, support foreign dictators, and mangle the English language. Or the fact that Jews, having suffered such persecution themselves, should now behave badly to others.

So it is perhaps a compliment to both nations that they should be held to higher standards than any other.

There's no "perhaps" about it, in my view. The best statement of this theme of which I know emerged from the pen of Jorge Luis Borges in his essay "A Comment on August 23, 1944." This was the date of the liberation of Paris--that date when, in the exultant streets of Buenos Aires, Borges made "the discovery that a collective emotion can be noble." I've never seen Borges' writings on the war discussed as such, and this is a shame: they are as marvelous as, though far less compendious than, Orwell's contemporary work along the same lines. The half-English Borges' final terse comment on the Germanophiles surrounding him in Argentina is one a reader may have cause to recall, very often, in our own time:

They apply the canon of Jesus to the actions of England, but the canon of Zarathustra to those of Germany.

Via MobyLives, we learn of an appreciation in the Independent of the world's largest and most inflammable bookstore, Foyles of London, which is about to turn 100 years old. By "largest" I mean "has the most books", which is what counts, or should.

For decades, Foyles has been a shopper's nightmare, with miles and miles of haphazardly arranged titles, non-English-speaking student staff, and a payment system apparently designed by a Victorian lunatic.

I was pretty startled, upon my visit to the store, to see it staffed by the same stroppy, scraggly, besweatered Raskolnikovs I was familiar with from home. Is there some kind of international secret society to which independent bookstore staffers subscribe? Are they like the Masons? Do they order the John Lennon specs from some centralized warehouse? What would happen if you fed one of them a decent meal--would he spontaneously combust? As for the cataloguing and shelving, the main influence seems to be Attila the Hun; you're quite likely to see volumes of the Loeb Classical Library interspersed with Captain Shambles' Colour Annual for Rumbustious Boy-Children. The store is, in sum, absolutely the best thing ever in the whole world. I'm hoping to move in to one of the upper floors someday--just take a pillow and a sleeping bag and remain there to live out my golden years. Trust me: it's not like I'd be noticed.

Here's some advice for those of you who may be planning "hate crimes": get good and drunk first! The Edmonton police are still investigating a New Year's Day incident on the subway in which a crowd of Indian youths randomly antagonized, attacked, and beat five white teenagers. But they've made up their mind about at least one thing: no hate here!

Edmonton police admitted Tuesday they may have been "a little premature" to conclude an attack by a group of native teens on five white teenagers on the LRT was racially motivated. ...Police originally described the incident as a racially motivated attack by about 30 native teens on white teenagers. Now, however, police say there were only about five teens involved in the attack and there is no firm evidence that racism was a factor.

But look a little closer at the story--you'll have to. It is still undisputed that the five victims were outnumbered by a group of at least 15 native Indians who entered the train together. Police spokesman Wes Bellmore wants us to state and accept that only five of the Indian kids were "involved in the attack" because they were the only ones doing the actual physical attacking. If you stand around intimidating other passengers who might have come to the aid of the victims (which they notably did not), well, that's not "involvement", apparently. Unfortunately, the Journal's slanted language gives the false impression that the violence was a relatively fair five-on-five fight.

And what of this "lack of racial motivation"? Are the police saying that no one in the mob of attackers shouted "Let's fuck up these white bitches," as was reported previously? No indeed.

"Racial comments that were reportedly uttered by someone in the group of attackers cannot be attributed to any one person," police spokesman Wes Bellmore said...

By this standard, if someone shouts "Hang the nigger" and an all-white crowd responds with a lynching, there's no "racial motivation" involved unless you can "attribute" the original battle cry to "any one person". This is a highly unorthodox and nuanced view indeed--but one must wonder whether the police are as evolved as they make themselves out to be when they say something like this:

The investigating police officer believes the attack was the result of "alcohol consumption and a rowdy 'group mentality' among the attackers."
"The more the investigator spoke with people who were involved, the more he realized that it was likely just boisterous, alcohol-related trouble-making," Bellmore said.

Is it just me, or does it sound like these cops have decided "Aw, those crazy, drunken savages--you can't hold 'em responsible! They're like children really--get 'em in a big group, fill them with firewater, it's like tossing a cigarette in a powderkeg."

But it's probably not mere condescension-cum-white-guilt that has the cops downplaying the "hate" angle. The position Bellmore et al. are in is not difficult to understand: they rely on "healthy linkages" with aboriginal communities to do their job effectively. As soon as this incident was reported in the press, the papers immediately went to the Rolodexes and found plenty of Indians willing to say that they were the real victims here, because the troublemaking of a few boisterous bad apples was inevitably going to reflect on innocent Indians. They're right to be concerned, and certainly right to worry about the setback for race relations in Edmonton: but a double standard on "hate crime" is only going to make things worse for them in the long run, and we all know that the outrage would still be on full boil if the attackers had been white and the victims Indian. I'm afraid I cannot, on the available evidence, join Edmonton's finest in their self-serving pretense.

Baghdad resident "Salam Pax" is anti-Saddam, but isn't super thrilled at the prospect of being boiled, blasted or burned to death, either. He's too fatalistic to be pigeonholed quite accurately. But it's easy to say how he feels about foreign "human shields" in Iraq.

Those foreigners are all over the place, I think I know what it should be called: War Tourism. betcha they will be out of here faster than you can say 'Iraqi-peace-team' when things get a bit too hot.

It must have been a slow day for news people because the Mutanabi Street was full of them, or Iraqis selling second hand books have become important news items. At least three news teams were filming in that crowded street with their Iraqi minders shooing people away from the cameras. Later on I walked thru Al-Rasheed and Al-Sadoon and they were all over. Not news teams this time but the War Tourists, some of them even carrying backpacks which have [Iraq peace team] written on them in gold marker. And I guess we will be getting more tourists soon. Come on, have a couple of days on us. They will be accommodating you in Al-Rasheed Hotel for free and you get the official sight seeing tour, a couple of lunches with people you can tell your kids you met, when they are shown on CNN and you get to be on TV singing "give peace a chance" in front of the UN building in Abu Nawas (don't miss the excellent grilled fish--masgoof--while you are there, the restaurants have a good view of one of the oldest presidential palaces).

I know they all mean well, but I really don't think coming here and getting photographed with Iraqi officials is helping their "cause". Do thy really want to stand up and risk their lives for this regime. If you are so in love with the situation here, be my guest. Let's trade places because if it is a "cause" for you, for me it's my life and the way I have to go thru it.

All right... there is one thing I'm curious about with the SOTU speech. Here's a morsel of Bush's indictment of Saddam:

Iraq is blocking U-2 surveillance flights requested by the United Nations.

Is there really any prospect of Iraqi air defence successfully bringing down a U-2? I'm no expert, but it seems improbable. And 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?

Headline from today's Chicago-Sun Times:

SAG hops aboard 'Chicago' bandwagon

Where is this bandwagon? What's it made of, and who's driving it? Can it be burned, and its occupants murdered??? Please?

James Bowman hinted at the possible existence of such a juggernaut when Chicago first came out. He wrote:

On Broadway, the invitation to feel superior works better, since part of the Broadway experience is the sense of belonging to an élite. Of course you're a sophisticate; that's why you're watching a Broadway play. The rubes and the suckers are everybody who doesn't watch Broadway plays. But that sociological raison d'être doesn't translate along with the rest of the material to the movies. The movies are watched by everybody. They're too democratic to invite their audience to feel superior to others.

A clue that the filmmakers understand this difficulty comes during the credits, when we are solemnly notified as follows:

"Richard Gere's singing and dancing performed by Richard Gere."

"Renée Zellweger's singing and dancing performed by Renée Zellweger."

"Catherine Zeta-Jones's singing and dancing performed by Catherine Zeta-Jones."

I have no reason to doubt these assurances, but they suggest a nervous awareness of the need to follow such an exercise in cynicism by assurances that, although everything may be a fake and a sham and a con-job, here in the movie at least all is--for the only time ever, perhaps--just what it claims to be.

No one ever went broke, the old saying goes, underestimating the capacity for cognitive dissonance of the American public. Bowman might object to a small exercise in cod-Marxism, but I think there's a hidden economic reason for the curious disclaimer in Chicago's credits. As you may have heard, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences intends to move the date of the Oscars to much earlier in the calendar next year. This is a sort of studio détente designed to end the crazed arms race of Oscar lobbying which takes over the industry now for the first six weeks of the year. The trade papers and the junketeers, those pumps eternally ready for priming, will be de-privileged. In that light, what do you notice about the nature of the announcement that Chicago's stars did all their own crooning and hoofing? That's right: it's a means of lobbying for Oscars inside the film itself. It costs nothing and it grabs you before you've even lifted your feet from the gummy cinema floor. And, judging by Chicago's very healthy box-office numbers, it works damn well.

If you're looking for instapunditry on the SOTU address you've come to the wrong place. However, can I say--since I was just talking somebody's ear off about it and I felt it was a good pretext for updating the weblog--that Bush is certainly the best American political communicator since Reagan? It may sound funny to say this of a man who can't pronounce "nuclear" correctly, but it occurs to me that he probably knows perfectly damn well how to say the word. (It may be useful to recall what I told you before about the "Ki-ota Protocol" and Churchill's "narzees".)

The almost laboured and desperate quality of Bush's oratory is in fact a new solution to the problem of how to perform a speech for broadcast. FDR and Stanley Baldwin discovered the orthodox approach before TV was invented: avoid dramatic gestures and flourishes--go for intimacy. (Whenever he was introduced on the radio, Baldwin was said to take a moment to light his pipe before proceeding. This is recognizable as a manifestation of genius, that rare but essential actor on history's stage.) But now that the masses have learned to recognize politicians as their enemy, instead of as father figures, attaining this sort of intimacy has become impossible. Reagan, a trained actor, was the last person capable of it. Unless Tom Hanks goes entirely mad and runs for office, we are not likely to see another orthodox politician in the style of the intimate patriarch.

But I think Bush, as I say, is a whole new model. This isn't cultivated folksiness: anybody who describes Bush as a "good ol' boy" probably hasn't met one. It's something else. How does the viewer respond to his "I just gotta put my head down and get through the next 45 minutes alive" technique? It creates drama, for one thing. I think the most hysterical Democrat alive would admit that Bush's SOTU speeches are vastly more compelling, in that respect, than Bill Clinton's agonizing orgies of silky-smooth self-congratulation. Bush's visible difficulties give him a wholly genuine aura of intensity. He's got a message; he's struggling, just a little, to get it out to you. Who can reject that on a psychic level? The occasional "nucular" locks you in on the words, when your natural bent might be to drift off on the uniquely patterned waves of Texan oratorical music. I've never found myself parsing political speech on the fly so closely as I do with W.

Being a little scared isn't Bush's only advantage: it helps him that he is understood, by us, to be a man with real convictions, and it helps him that there are still shadings of New England in his Texanismus. At any rate, I don't think he's like anything we've seen before. He's found--blundered into, if you like--a whole new way of doing this exercise.

Deroy Murdock has a posse! Our Bermuda correspondent, financial analyst Jefferson Glapski, has taken umbrage with my distaste at the idea of rebuilding the WTC exactly as it was. He thinks it's a terrific notion. I've given his letter its own page for those seeking a view contrary to my own. Warning: JNG writes like the offspring of Ayn Rand and a longshoreman. Swear words have not been edited out (perish the thought), and editorial interpolations are indicated in square brackets. Additional, pro forma warning: JNG's opinions are strictly his own, and do not represent the views of any employer or client of his, nor of this site. Enjoy!

Pack, Not a Herd, Dept.: Rick "The Miscellanist" Hiebert has offered a convincing solution to the mystery of the winemongering Salvationist. He wasn't a "wine clerk", he was a wire clerk, handling telegrams for a bank or some similar institution. Yeah, I knew that all along, I was just testing you guys...

[UPDATE, January 29: The digital Canadian memory does not just contain WW1 personnel records; the Canadian Virtual War Memorial contains individual pages for all of Canada's known war dead. My great-granduncle R.M. lived to a ripe old age, but his son, trainee bomber crewman LAC Robert Monteith Cosh Jr., RCAF, was killed in a crash on Canadian soil in August 1943. He is commemorated here and you can view his page in the national Book of Remembrance. In case this text attracts hardcore military buffs, I must state that I am unrelated to Lt Cdr D.R.B. Cosh, DSC, RCNVR, who commanded HMCS Niobe (an onshore naval facility in Scotland) and participated in the disabling of the Kriegsmarine battleship Tirpitz at Altenfjord in April 1944.]

Great Minds, Etc., Dept.: My ill-informed take on the Super Bowl is ratified almost to the letter in the NFL season's final, not-at-all-ill-informed Tuesday Morning Quarterback. Here's Cosh, yesterday:

Buccaneer pass-rushers spent the whole day beating the Raider tackles like red-headed stepchildren with fetal alcohol syndrome. An O-line is a connected whole, a team within a team, and it shouldn't surprise anyone if weakness at centre manifests itself on the outside.

And here's Easterbrook with the details:

The Oakland OL produced one of the worst blocking performances TMQ has ever winced through, in part because its schemes were disrupted. On most plays, one of the guards, Mo Collins or Frank Middleton, helped reserve center Adam Treu handle his man, leaving the Raiders' tackles "on islands." Left tackle Barry Sims usually gets guard help. With Robbins out and Treu getting the help, Sims was cover-your-eyes, too, on two occasions barely so much as waving at Rice before the gentleman blew in to paste Gannon.

In not so many words: the weakness at centre manifested itself on the outside. Don't they cover this stuff in Football Theory 101?

Now this is quite amazing. The National Archives' online digital version of the 1906 Census (discussed here) doesn't quite work yet, or I can't get it to. But while messing around at the Archives site I discovered that images of the attestation papers of 765,000 Canadian soldiers of the Great War are online. Including two of my great-granduncles, Robert Monteith Cosh (1892-1970) and his younger brother Thomas Rankin Cosh (1894-1975). An apparent paradox emerges in the latter's record--he seems to have stated his occupation as "wine clerk" but his religious affiliation is listed as Salvationist. A Salvationist wine clerk...? If anyone can supply a plausible alternate reading of T.R.'s hard-to-decipher occupation, I'd like to hear it. [UPDATE, 9:03 pm: Case closed!]

You can search for your CEF relations here. Don't panic if Gramps isn't in the database, though; many Canadian enlistees served with British units.

Talk about missing the real story! In reporting on Monday's U.S. Supreme Court activity, newspapers and wire services are zeroing in on the Nextwave decision (denying the FCC the right to swoop in on a bankrupt telco and re-sell its wireless spectrum licenses) as well as the refusal to review Hain (a juvenile-on-death-row case). That's all very interesting, I guess, especially if you're related to the teenage murderer or whatnot, but what about the magnificent victory handed down to Danish bubblegum popsters Aqua?

The high court denied review in an important trademark case, Mattel Inc. v. MCA Records, No. 02-633. Mattel claimed that MCA had diluted and damaged its Barbie trademark by marketing the song "Barbie Girl," by the Danish group Aqua. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had sided with MCA, finding that consumers would not be confused by the song.

Alas, the foursome did not last long enough to experience sweet legal vindication.

Deroy Murdock wants the WTC towers replaced exactly as they were, "right down to the last butter knife at Windows on the World". A tempting idea. We'll probably never get consensus, in advance, on what should replace them. Murdock's imagined simulacrum offers an attractive means of cutting the Gordian knot. The one problem is that the Towers themselves were pretty horrid; they were sanctified only retrospectively, by their sudden disappearance. Even admirers of Yamasaki don't seem to have thought much of them until they were gone. It is somehow creepy to say that we should take advantage of the opportunity presented by Atta and co., but how much creepier is what Murdock's advocating? When we're finished rebuilding the Towers, what do we do?--move on to cloning the 3,000-some dead?

Anyway, that's neither here nor there; I wanted to direct your attention to Murdock's lede:

A team of architecture scholars is scanning U.S. landmarks with laser beams, just in case. Should terrorists demolish the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore, or the U.S. Capitol, Texas Tech University's highly detailed, reverse-engineered, digital database will make it easier to restore those structures to their rightful homes in America's hearts and minds.

A brief search led me to Texas Tech's Digital Liberty, where the laser scanning of the Statue of Liberty is chronicled. There are some extraordinary images under "Work Examples". I particularly like the point-cloud image of the tablet, the oddly Kollwitz-isch wireframe image of the head, and this blue-stained face-on register image--Boadicea rediviva, perhaps?

My ill-informed take on yesterday's Super Bowl: Rich Gannon's arm was always pretty slender material to build a title on. A lot of commentators have praised his dog's-breakfast throwing technique. I myself rather like seeing the 37-year-old Gannon out there, chucking the ball like a bursitic dad having a catch with his teenage son. But this isn't baseball; nobody's standing there with a bat. Good quarterbacks, on the whole, display good form. Gannon piled up yards this year because the Raider offense was designed to take maximum advantage of his chicken wing.

It might have worked, too, if the Raider offensive line had been its usual self. During the broadcast Madden said something like "The Raiders aren't losing this game because they have Adam Treu playing centre [instead of All-Pro Barret Robbins]." Yeah, well, OK, Madden: your soft spot for bench-warming fatties is well known. The fact remains that Buccaneer pass-rushers spent the whole day beating the Raider tackles like red-headed stepchildren with fetal alcohol syndrome. An O-line is a connected whole, a team within a team, and it shouldn't surprise anyone if weakness at centre manifests itself on the outside. Defenses of Treu like John Clayton's ("Treu did a respectable job and didn't get beaten for a sack until late in the fourth quarter...") are valid as far as they go, but beside the point. Anyone who's played football will tell you that it's never just one guy who's beaten for a sack unless he misses a blocking assignment outright.

From the Inbox: the Liberal government announced Friday that it is going to have another go at what the Americans call campaign finance reform. This illustrates the operating maxim of the Liberals: "Extremism in the offence of liberty is no vice." The Calgary Herald's Joan Bryden reports:

Canada's House leader announced Friday the government will appeal an Alberta court ruling last month that struck down the so-called election gag law, which imposes spending limits on advocacy groups during election campaigns.

Don Boudria said it would make no sense to allow groups such as the National Citizens' Coalition to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence the outcome of elections when parties and candidates are all subject to strict limits.

However, NCC vice-president Gerry Nicholls said the law denies "freedom of expression." He added that groups such as the coalition should not be compared to political parties since they don't pass legislation or hand out subsidies.

The Herald is a magisterial newspaper; one is shocked to find, in a Herald story on spending limits, absolutely no mention of just how often Canadian courts have struck down such limits. That spending limits on third parties are an assault on free speech is not merely Gerry Nicholls' opinion; it has been the opinion of every judge who has ever scrutinized them. The cases have generally been brought by the NCC and its officers, which the Liberals are now openly singling out as a target.

To review the history Joan Bryden didn't give you, then: the Elections Act was amended to include electoral spending limits, with a "good faith" exception for single-issue advertising by third parties, in 1974. The Liberals threw out the "good faith" exception in 1983, describing it as a "loophole". An Alberta court struck down that amendment, on Charter grounds, in 1984. The Mulroney government let things stand thus, but when the Liberals got back in they rapidly introduced a spending ban confined to the period immediately before an election. Alberta Queen's Bench struck that law down on Charter grounds in 1993. The government appealed, but the Alberta Court of Appeal endorsed the Queen's Bench ruling in 1996. So naturally the Liberals re-introduced new Election Act amendments, essentially similar to the quashed ones, in 2000. Queen's Bench struck down the new limits in June 2001. The government appealed to the Alberta Court of Appeal, which endorsed the Queen's Bench ruling, again, in December. Outside Alberta, the Supreme Court has struck down spending limits on Quebec referendum campaigns (1997), has struck down federal limits on peri-electoral news broadcasting (1998), and has struck down provincial spending limits imposed by the old New Democrat government of British Columbia (1998).

By my count, the writers of gag laws on political advertising are oh-for-at-least-eight in trying to sneak past the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. They've never won on a Charter test. But the Liberals, despite this very strident message from Canada's judges, now intend to spend your money and mine trying, once again, to bully private, non-profit political activist groups.

Constitution, you say? What Constitution?

The New Democratic Party is keeping quite shtum, you may have noticed, about its daffy leadership convention vote. By the way, for those who recall how I made fun of the French language for the way it explodes Anglo-Saxon noun pairings (like, for example, "noun pairings"), I have a counterexample for you: I noticed while watching CPAC that the French call a leadership convention a chefferie. One word to stand for our two clumsy ones! I'd like to see the English language steal it, although the chef part might create confusion...

...anyway, I have a quick point to make about election.com, the company that oversaw the balloting on behalf of the NDs. This is the first time most of us have heard of election.com, surely. How do we know these guys can be counted on? Their name doesn't exactly scream "long, trusted tradition". (It doesn't even scream "good sense"--how many dot-com firms still haven't gotten around to getting rid of their equity-poisoning dot-com names?) Fortunately, election.com is allied with, and partly owned by, a firm with a long track record of probity--Accenture, the Company Formerly Known As Andersen Consulting. The Accenturions would definitely want me to note that "since August 7, 2000, Accenture has not been associated with Andersen Worldwide or Arthur Andersen". They're also not associated with X-Files star Gillian Anderson, but they remain huge fans of her work.

Go ahead and laugh! Me, I think it's great that the New Dems have gotten wise to the value of outsourcing. Follow the bouncing ball:

Election.com has offices in the United States (Garden City, NY; Washington, DC; Austin, TX; and Chicago, IL); Europe (London; Paris; Geneva and Dublin); and the Asia-Pacific (Sydney; Canberra; Brisbane; and Christchurch, New Zealand).

Damn, I don't have my contact lenses in, but I'm sure there's a Canadian branch office, with Canadian employees, in that list somewhere...

So Dave Barry has a weblog now. It's probably not cool to respect Dave's talent, because your mom--practically by definition--thinks he's really "funny and cute." But I do. I'm not even going to make the snide joke I had planned about how "Dave Barry's Blog" would be a really good name for a rock band [pause for riotous laughter].

What I do wonder is this: between writing his column (approx. 1 day/week) and mugging for camera lenses (approx. 6 days/week), where's the poor guy going to find the time to post? As Layne says, enjoy it while it lasts.

Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lord Dacre of Glanton, has died at the age of 89. The poor man must have been bedevilled by the fear--now confirmed--that his botched authentication of the "Hitler diaries" would be right up in the lede of his obituary. How could it have been otherwise? Once the diaries were combed seriously for chronological implausibilities, their fraudulence was obvious; the arcane forensic tests performed on them were a formality. T-R just didn't do the legwork. I've never heard the whole story--checking the diaries is the sort of work that strikes me as perfect for a graduate student, so perhaps that's how he got into trouble: by overdelegating. (Doesn't anyone else find it funny that when academic scandal strikes somebody like Michael Bellesiles, there is never any hint that graduate students might have assisted with their documentary work, or even, say, done the bulk of it?)

The real irony was that his haphazard signing-off on the Stern forgery dented his radically antiprofessional views on the practice of history--which I believe to be correct.

His approach to history was essentially belletrist--based not so much on original research as on wide reading and an ability to bring to bear insights derived from other disciplines on his subjects. He sought to appeal to a wide cultivated audience.
In his inaugural lecture as regius professor, he defended this approach, saying modern history would have "dried up and perished long ago" without the contribution of economists, sociologists, philosophers, art historians and even anthropologists and psychologists.

How funny it is that A.J.P. Taylor, of all people, was Trevor-Roper's bête noire. The compelling things about Taylor were (1) the excellence of his prose, (2) his devastatingly wide learning, and (3) his appeal to a broad cultivated audience--he was one of the genuinely popular broadcasting stars among British academics, forming a pretty direct bridge from C.E.M. Joad to Simon Schama and David Starkey. Trevor-Roper couldn't match Taylor in any of these areas, but he was right to emphasize them; if more than three or four professional historians in the entire world could speak as clearly and confidently as Taylor, the case for professionalism would be a good deal stronger.

David Artemiw is having a field day with the New Democrats--his own former party of choice, if I recall right. He's got a semi-official reaction from the party, some comedic boilerplate from the company who ran the technical side, and, most important, some preliminary math on those supersized labour votes. We can't say whether the inflated ballots of the 957 labour voters changed the outcome--yet. However, we can say, based on Artemiw's calculations, that each labour union representative cast the equivalent of 15.2 ordinary ballots in the voting. But then, some animals have always been more equal than others.

And now I have to do an uncharacteristic thing: thank the federal government. (CHOKE! GAG!) As usual, I have to thank them not for any positive good, but for relenting on years of unpleasant bureaucratic behaviour. Canadian law has traditionally allowed census records to be made public after a 92-year period of secrecy, and in 1998 historians and geneologists were excited about the imminent release of the data from the special 1906 Census of the North-West Provinces. To westerners doing this work, no historical data could be of greater value. This census is the most detailed extant record of the first wave of immigration to Manitoba and the new provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. For hundreds of thousands of us, this was the first documentary snapshot of our families' appearance in the new land.

But things never go as easy as they should, do they? The staff of the National Archives, as I understand it, was eager to release the data. But some ardent lawyer at Statistics Canada, hoping to win a gold star, pointed out that personal information had been given to the 1906 census-takers under a promise of perpetual secrecy. The release of the data would therefore violate new federal privacy legislation. In the presumptive interests of (mostly) dead people, the government sabotaged the perfectly reasonable expectations and plans of Western historians.

A see-saw battle of letters and complaints ensued as the withheld census mouldered in the vaults. The federal information commissioner saw reason and ordered Statscan to allow the release of the census ("I find it difficult to understand what the big problem is"--join the club). Statscan refused. No one, to this day, is quite certain why the agency held so fast to its flimsy legal pretext. Perhaps they were simply trying to prove that they take privacy seriously, or perhaps they just wanted to delay until the last living people inscribed on the rolls were a little older, a little less likely to launch a frivolous lawsuit. In any event, the controlling federal department, Industry Canada, instructed the Archives to release the census today. It was online in a heartbeat. Does the Internet not rule? It does.

Bourque has spun up the NDP's electronic-voting troubles to a thousand RPM, excellently encapsulating David Artemiw's experience with questions raised before and after the vote totals were released.

Have others also acted out on this opportunity to skew the NDP leadership vote count? How many? Were the names of unsuspecting NDP members picked off membership lists, with wholesale substitute voting undertaken without either the individual member or even the Party itself knowing anything about it? It remains unclear if the NDP is aware that their vote count has been tainted by this shocking defect in their electoral process. Add to all of this the developing concerns about why so few votes were done over the Internet, why close to half of all eligible members failed to record a vote, and why convention organizers repeatedly delayed announcing the voting results, especially given the few actual votes cast today alone...

Will the newspapers run with the ball? Can't wait to find out. Reporters should keep the pressure on the party to release those weighted labour union vote totals, too. Most observers on the scene anticipated that Layton would have problems cracking 50% if he didn't get there on the first ballot; most of the tail-enders seemed ready to bolt towards Blaikie, rather than to the maverick outsider. Would Layton have reached 50% under a one-man one-vote system? Let's hope somebody in Canadian journalism is able to handle the math. [UPDATE, 10:56 pm: more here.]

Meanwhile, Warren Kinsella has hit a new level of stridency in his accusations of election theft against what he calls the "Martinite gang". There's not going to be a Liberal coronation if Warren can help it! It's impossible to credit him with any such thing as "idealism", but he's certainly got guts to go with those big brass balls. His own horse in the race, Allan Rock, couldn't stand the early pace and had to be humanely destroyed at trackside. Warren's not the kind of political operator who is likely to find a soft landing in another party when the dust settles, and his stunts have already made him somewhat radioactive amongst Liberals. Idealist or not, he's burning bridges he could have more profitably spent the next year painting. But he does have the slight advantage of being right--if a logical explanation exists as to why the party is limiting access to memberships, I haven't seen it. And the spectre of a loose cannon below decks on the HMS Liberal is always edifying.

[UPDATE, January 26: My inner editor has sentenced me to death for mixed metaphor in the eighteenth degree. Ironically, the punishment involves being lashed to a loose cannon atop a burning bridge whereon a horserace is taking place. Top of the world, Ma! This entry will remain here as a terrible warning to future generations.]

NDP leadership news: the first-ballot results have been delayed, and an uncertain number of voters driven off outright, by a denial-of-service attack. Aw, who did that? That's not mature, that's not clever. The record of electronic balloting in Canada is an unrelenting saga of failure and embarrassment, so naturally the NDs couldn't resist. Now there will be lingering questions about the validity of any victor. Just ask David Artemiw: he was able to vote by using the old "Lost my login ID" scam.

[UPDATE, 1:27 pm: The Ontario president of CUPE (the Canadian Union of Public Employees) just called the mandatory 25% weighting of labour-union votes "undemocratic". Finally a socialist uses that word correctly! The party will disclose the distribution of the union vote for the first time in its history.]

[UPDATE, 2:25 pm: Layton wins, getting clear of 50% on the first ballot by about 2,000 "votes" (some of which came in fractions when the math was done on the labour-union weighting).]

Gotta love that Ambler, but I didn't approve of him using the Super Bowl as an occasion for waving the Canadian flag in 1999, and I still don't in 2003. His argument implies directly that he shouldn't watch American football at all, or even be permitted to. If we're to bar the American commercials at the border, why not the American game itself? Because it's "better"?--well, so are the commercials, aren't they?

Of course, even in the oppressive presence of the splendid foreign festival that is the Super Bowl, one is free to celebrate and enjoy the distinct, exciting game of Canadian football during its season--as some of us actually do. If Canadian cultural sovereignty begins anywhere, surely it's on the 55-yard line?

[UPDATE, January 26: The Ambler ripostes.]

I made some changes to the blogroll. I had dithered so long in adding links to Julian Sanchez and Radley Balko that I decided to build a "libertarian" category around them. Everyone packed in there with them is either a super-obvious libertoid or belongs there by virtue of their own explicit declaration to that effect. If anyone wants to be moved or added, drop me a line. Non-U.S. libertarians will remain in geographic categories, though. According to my vague and preposterous classification scheme, I myself would fall under "Canadian Content". But, man, pleeeeeeze don't ask me to justify the sorting.

Not on the blogroll is my old buddy Ian. Why the hell not? First of all, by his own admission, he has no idea whether he'll be updating regularly. Secondly, I don't have a category for "I Went to High School With This Guy". Bluegrass will probably be a major theme of his weblog if he can find the spare time to work on it. There's an interesting bit in his latest entry:

In other news, a scary article on Opinion Journal today about the percentage of black students that graduate high school/pass basic testing. I'm originally from Canada and I always thought our schools were lousy, but when I compare them to things like this or to the stories my girlfriend tells about going to school in Pinole, they come out looking a lot better. I had to deal with dull teachers, incompetent staff and misguided curriculums, but I not only learned to read, I also learned the basics of math and science. That's not saying much given what schools should be teaching, but I guess in the education lottery, I came out OK.

I'm afraid I share the feeling that public-school-educated Canadians--Albertans in particular--have a much better head start in reading, math, and science than p.-s.-e. Americans. It's not necessarily that we're better at education, but social conditions favour us. Litigious parents are only now learning how to throw schools into chaos here. We haven't had to deal with fallout from Brown vs. Board of Education, forced busing, or any serious race problem; East and South Asian immigrants have a relatively congenial relationship to the majority culture here, and we've kept the natives/Indians/aboriginal peoples out of sight and out of mind, with a considerable assist from their own self-segregating tendencies. There are other factors. It's certainly not a question of moral superiority--we basically just get a lot of unearned benefits out of being humble, muddled, milquetoast Canada. Kids, parents, and teachers can go ahead and focus on the work without the outlandish amateur dramatics that have infected so many American schools. But of course everything is gradually changing for the worse.

Tomorrow morning the New Democrats, Canada's ever more marginalized party of overt social democracy, will select a new leader. What fun! It's farewell to champagne Marxist Alexa McDonough--but who will replace her? Much is being made of the deep differences between favourite Jack Layton (he's the one who looks vaguely like Ted Turner) and Bill Blaikie (he's the gap-toothed, ursine one). As I understand it, Layton stands for transforming the New Democrats into a pro-active, progressive, realistic left-wing alternative. By contrast, Blaikie is striking a totally different path towards a realistic, pro-active, left-wing progressive alternative. It's always nice when the choices are so starkly defined.

By the time you read this, the New Dems will have flipped a coin and gone with one man or the other. McDonough didn't make any headway in her attempt to be the NDP's midget harridan version of Tony Blair. Layton offers the vision of a green, urban-centred NDP: that won't play well in Saskatchewan, the old heartland, but it should work very nicely on Toronto voters, with their infinite thirst for snake oil. Layton would probably grow the party in the short term, not that it will take much. Blaikie wants to recruit a new generation of NDs from amongst the Starbucks-smashing set--a doomed enterprise that can only bring freelance-Left schisms into the bosom of an already disunited political instrument. Neither one has found the formula that could actually save the party: ignoring the shrill interest groups who have been dragging it down for twenty years. Although Layton could capture the energy of green paranoia, I do find myself respecting the idealism of Blaikie's pitch. He told the Ottawa Citizen that his model for the future of the NDP is--believe it or not--the Canadian Alliance.

You haven't seen thousands of right-wingers, marching and waving protest signs, except for maybe a few about gun control. But you have seen them elect dozens of MPs and you have seen Liberal governments sufficiently frightened by that to do their bidding.

Despite the powerful look of the big demonstrations in Quebec City and elsewhere, you haven't seen many of the left's ideas adopted by the Liberals. Governments act out of fear of losing, not out of fear of being protested against. They fear voters, not demonstrators.

While the Canadian Alliance worries incessantly about becoming a "right-wing NDP", at least some New Democrats are trying to turn their party into a left-wing Alliance. They can't all be right! And Blaikie certainly isn't--not all the way. I believe the Liberal government is largely happy to let vague left-wing discontent peter itself out in the occasional brawl with the RCMP. But what are the "right-wing ideas" supposedly put into effect due to Reform/Alliance pressure? The Alliance likes to take credit for deficit reduction and privatization, and deserves some, but these things have happened in all Western democracies--even those under the aegis of left and social-democratic governments. If Ed Broadbent had been prime minister in 1990, it's hard to see how history would have been substantially different between then and now. Beyond the bottom line of the federal budget, it's the Supreme Court that's driven much if not most of the real political change. What's left when you filter out judicial fiat--the gun registry and Kyoto? These are the right-wing wet dreams Blaikie is yammering about?

Fact is, the Liberals don't much fear voters or demonstrators. They control the horizontal and vertical--they've got the Supreme Court and the Senate sewn up for the foreseeable future, and their baseline support among the electorate can't go too low as long as their coalition of ethnic interests and public-sector beneficiaries doesn't fly apart. Their national share of the vote was 38% in 1997 and 41% in 2000. Their floor is probably not far shy of 30%--that is to say, that's about the number of Canadians whose votes are controlled by the leaders of various religious or ethnic communities, or who stand to suffer a direct financial penalty from a loss by the open-handed Liberals, or both. Half of Quebec is what, 10% of the country right there.

Which tends to militate against Blaikie's faith in electoral politics: the non-Liberal parties, taken together, already do nearly as good a job as can be reasonably expected. If the Liberal floor is 30%, that suggests that the Liberals, even in 2000, only got 11% out of the 70% of votes not previously and quasi-permanently committed to them. One in six. In '97 it was more like one in nine. If the New Democrats can't hit the Liberals where they live, and it's not likely they can, they have to try and skim support from the other parties. That means cutting out the interest-group politics and defining a platform that transcends the political spectrum to some degree. It's not my job to do that for them, and won't be; but environmentalism isn't going to work, identity politicking isn't going to work, and nationalizing industry isn't going to work. Does this ragged band know how to play any other tunes?

I'm gonna warn you right now: it's important not to laugh at the Colossal Colon. I'm sure you're probably thinking, in your immature way, there's something real snickerworthy about a 40-foot walk-in (crawl-in, actually) replica of the human intestinal tract. No doubt you find it highly amusing that the Colossal Colon has a "back door" festooned with hemorrhoids the size of pumpkins. But when the Colossal Colon saves your life, will you still think it's so funny? Huh? Maybe this little tidbit of depressing information will silence your infernal tittering:

The Colossal Colon is the creation of Molly McMaster, a 26-year-old cancer survivor, with help and support from the clinical and educational staff of the C.R. Wood Cancer Center at Glens Falls Hospital, Glens Falls, N.Y. The Colon is dedicated to the memory of Molly's friend, Amanda Sherwood Roberts, who lost her battle with colon cancer at age 27.

That's right, Mr. Everything-Is-A-Joke-To-Me: the Colossal Colon is a solemnly consecrated monument to an absent friend. So why don't you wipe that smirk off your face and get inside the rectum already. (Via the Layne-discovered "DaveB".)

Oh man. Don't put off checking out the Vancouver Police's photos of Guns & Roses rioters. They're disappearing one by one as police identify the property-smashing metallions, which is a shame; a superb piece of cultural anthropology like this deserves to be saved for future generations. My favourites are Party #44, Party #20, and loogie-spraying Party #22.

Any other Richard Thompson fans out there? No, don't bother writing in only to say "Yes." I ask because Sufism (The Real Religion of Peace™) appears to be quite hip indeed just now. Richard Thompson, onetime lead guitarist for Fairport Convention and critically esteemed singer-songwriter, converted to Sufism in the early '70s when a lot of rock stars seemed to be facing a choice between drugs and Godhead. Thompson was deadly serious about his new faith, joining an improverished, filthy Sufi commune in the UK and taking a long sabbatical to study Muslim scriptures and generally avoid bad rock-industry influences--including electricity, according to some sketchy accounts. If Sufism is here to stay, perhaps RT won the religious lottery--or perhaps the Sufis did; Pete Townshend's embrace of Avatar Meher Baba at around the same time doesn't seem, at the moment, to have done either man or cult much good. And I doubt Carlos Santana likes being reminded of that whole "Devadip" thing.

It would be nice if there were a little glory deflected Thompson's way for having chosen a relatively respectable "spiritual path". But when you mention Islam to RT these days, he kind of laughs uneasily and protests that he's not a very good Muslim, all but holding up a ham on rye to prove it. In fact, he protests in a way that suggests, to me at least, that he's not much of a Muslim at all. He can't be reasonably expected to come right out and admit it--Sufi or no Sufi, Muslim apostates are "fair game," to use the old Scientologist term of art. Musicians run enough risk of sudden violent death without displays of excessive religious integrity.

I think Thompson--a sensible, charming sort--probably had some scales drop from his eyes right around the time that whole Salman Rushdie thing blew up. (He, himself, denounced the fatwa.) But the Sufis are the nice ones, you say? Maybe, maybe; certainly they're nicer than the alternative. What I notice, looking at Thommo's recorded output, is that the cynical, bleak tenor of his early solo work took on positively violent and apocalyptic tones after he went Muslim. I've always thought so--this isn't me rewriting history to suit a new view of Islam, although I could be plain wrong about it.

The critical consensus on Thompson favours the gloomy, man-at-the-end-of-his-rope stuff (I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight and Shoot Out the Lights), but I've always rather preferred Thommo's angry, crazy Muslim period. The albums First Light (1978) and Sunnyvista (1979) rampage across the emotional colour wheel, turning on a dime from shimmering, oceanic crypto-hymns to superlative heights of paranoia. There is gorgeous fodder for those seeking support for a view of Sufis as Muslim Shmoos. Never was religious questing more alluring than in the lacquered voice of Richard's wife Linda, who converted alongside him. (Linda split from Richard in history's ugliest and most public marital secession--literally played out on the stages of their last tour together--and now has a rich husband. She has recently overcome a longtime hysterical inability to sing, is resuming her career, and is open about her abandonment of Islam.) She sells the Islamic requirement of submission to God incomparably in "Sweet Surrender" ("I'd give the world for you/ Oh, oh, oh, sweet surrender... Allah, Allah, Allah") and riffs 23rd Psalm-style in "First Light" (Take me through the mountains/ Lead me from confusion/ Take me by the hand/ Through real and through illusion"). These are very seductive religious love songs, redolent of the Persian strain in Islam that tempers and humanizes its desert heart. (I trust and hope no Iranian, however Islamized, would ever chant "Down with beauty" like the Nigerian Miss World protesters.)

But when Richard sings, it's in the snarling voice of an Old Testament prophet. "Everyone is in love with money," he spits in "Don't Let a Thief Steal Into Your Heart". "How many days does a man think he has/ That he can spend his whole time dreaming?" Lest the bourgeoisie think it can get off with such a minor chiding, RT raises the stakes in "Civilisation":

They're not human, where do they come from?
I don't know what they're living here for
They don't belong here on this planet
What are they doing in the house next door

Wives tranquilised, pets pasteurised
Kids hypnotised by the TV
Gotta beat you, gotta leech you
They'll treat you like family

Thom Yorke, call your agent! Richard's basic grimness, hitherto contained and inner-directed, has tipped over into a rejection of humanity and an overt relishing of the unhappy fate in store for--whom? The unbeliever?

Oh, the rain is falling
And the wild wind roars
It'll shake your windows
And rattle your doors

Ah, blow down this house of cards...

They're washing the streets
With the blood of your kind
Ah, look over your shoulder
They're right behind

They'll be off your hands all day,
in the camps they'll play and play

There's sickness in this land, hearts are turned to sand
Crushed with an iron hand, there's justice in the street
Allah, Allah, Allah, Allah
Allah, Allah, Allah, Allah

They've fooled you for so long, you can't tell right from wrong
They're weak and you are strong, there's justice in the street
Allah, Allah, Allah, Allah
Allah, Allah, Allah, Allah

...Tired of living in shame, tired of a ball and chain
Run them down like a train, there's justice in the street
Allah, Allah, Allah, Allah
Allah, Allah, Allah, Allah

They've got you chained to a wheel and you don't know how to feel
Till you can't tell what's real, there's justice in the street
Allah, Allah, Allah, Allah
Allah, Allah, Allah, Allah

Richard soon returned to his old, relatively congenial self after fashioning these harrowing and enrapturing artistic documents. I'm a big fan, and of these records in particular; this level of intensity and bitterness is rarely attained, and certainly not in the electric folk bin, of all places. Perhaps I ought not to have gone on at such length about the post-conversion records' wild, vengeful, schizoid content; but Richard Thompson is one of the few cultural figures I can claim something close to expertise in, and his midlife conversion to Sufism, combined with his sublimity as a performer, give what I think is a useful window into the soul of the believer. What we see there is deeply, self-consciously uncivilized. Once you've renounced the world it is easy to form the desire to destroy it.

On NRO's Corner, Jonah Goldberg discusses problems with Alexa's traffic rankings, providing a useful caveat to the previously mentioned FreeDominion.ca web-traffic claims. A correspondent has also noted that FreeDominion's analysis only gives Bourque credit for his Bourque.com URL--but lots of people may still be using the old Bourque.org URL, which points to the same page. Connie at FreeDominion is investigating (but still thinks FD comes out ahead).

Elsewhere in the Corner Rod Dreher throws the M-word into the capital punishment debate:

My view is that if we can protect society reasonably without using the [death penalty], then we should choose life, and mercy, even though a murderer deserves to die.

Showing "mercy" to a criminal can only mean that, in his case, we spare him the punishment he would otherwise receive for his crime. If capital punishment is banned outright, the possibility of bestowing mercy by sparing life is thereby eliminated. You cannot make mercy a matter of policy; an act of mercy must be, by definition, an exception to a behavioural norm. If a judge has no choice but to grant it, it ain't mercy.

Mercy is, in fact, already given a significant place in the American justice system: that's why condemned criminals are always waiting for the call from the governor, no? And while the argumentum ad misericordiam may move sensitive souls, it is a universal corrosive. It can be used against any punishment--and therefore shouldn't be.

The Relapsed Catholic on 2001: A Space Odyssey: "Nobody really understands this ponderous mess. Admit it."

I think the makers of this Flash-animated guide to 2001 have made a monkey out of you, Ms. Shaidle. (Link via Metafilter)

March 28, 29, and 30. Those are the dates of the Alberta Conservative party's annual general meeting in Red Deer, and they could be the dates when Western alienation suddenly appears on the national agenda. Neil Waugh reports in today's Edmonton Sun that Premier Ralph Klein could find himself in an uncomfortable minority on federalism at the convention.

Constituency presidents have in their hands a package of resolutions from a dissident group of longtime Alberta PCs, led by Airdrie Tory Rob James, that hangs out all of Alberta's dirty laundry. The list includes the Kyoto accord, environmental authority, health care, the Triple-E Senate, firearms, the dictatorship of the prime minister, the Canadian Wheat Board, pensions, employment insurance, taxes and an Alberta police force.

In each case, PC delegates will be asked to instruct the government to "get constitutional agreement from the Government of Canada by Dec. 31, 2003. ...In the event all the approved resolutions have not been accomplished by the dates specified," the final resolution states, "the Alberta government will hold a binding referendum asking Albertans if they wish to separate from Confederation."

In a letter that James recently e-mailed to all constituency presidents and the executive, he claimed the response he has been getting is "nothing short of phenomenal."

And if there's anything like a fair vote, the resolution will pass. In fact, whether Klein allows that to happen or not will be the real test of whether he truly represents Albertans to Ottawa, or Ottawa to Albertans. Take to make up your mind, Ralph.

[UPDATE, January 4: the link to the relevant Waugh column now points to a later one and has been removed.]

Is there a creationist conspiracy within the paleontological profession? Scientific American explodes with delight this morning over a new and counterintuitive fossil discovery in China:

Paleontologists have recovered from deposits in Liaoning, China, dinosaur fossils that exhibit evidence of flight feathers on their hindlimbs as well as their forelimbs. The specimens are said to represent a long-sought intermediate stage in the evolution of birds from flightless theropod dinosaurs, and could breathe new life into the theory that protobirds glided between trees before developing powered, flapping flight.

Evolutionary biologists have long debated whether birds began winging it by gliding among the trees or by racing along on the ground. The latter scenario has gained favor in recent years. But the new finds, described in a report published today in the journal Nature, "provide negative evidence for the ground-up hypothesis" and instead support the arboreal gliding scenario, assert study author Xing Xu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and his colleagues.

Amazing! But wait! Aren't paleontologists still desperately trying to reassemble their credibility from the last major hoax to strike the profession? You might remember it--it was a new and counterintuitive fossil discovery in China that was said to represent a long-sought intermediate stage in the evolution of birds from dinosaurs...

The principal part of a famously fabricated dinosaur fossil is an ancient fish-eating bird, scientists report. The Archaeoraptor fossil was introduced in 1999 and hailed as the missing evolutionary link between carnivorous dinosaurs and modern birds. It was fairly quickly exposed as bogus, a composite containing the head and body of a primitive bird and the tail and hind limbs of a dromaeosaur dinosaur, glued together by a Chinese farmer.

Initial CT scans suggested that the fossil might have been made up of anywhere from two to five specimens of two or more species. Chinese and American scientists now report that the fabricated fossil is made up of two species.

Archaeoraptor was indeed exposed "fairly quickly"--but not until it had been celebrated around the world and made the subject of dozens of science stories. (And given a sexy Latin name.) Now it's a shiny new arrow in the creationists' quiver of scientific gullibility, to be fired at well-meaning Darwinists in debates for the next hundred years. Instead of waiting for the dust to settle and handling bizarre new fossils with caution, paleontologists seem determined to hype the Next Big Thing out of China. There appears to be zero recognition that a standard of even slightly higher rigour might need to be applied to Chinese dino-bird discoveries. So who do you suppose manufactured this one? A merchant banker? A gang of mischievous schoolchildren?

This is why good P.R. men get the big bucks. Since there's no chance my Expos are going to be on television much this year, and I'm practically past caring, I've been waiting for an announcement on whether Toronto Blue Jays games are going to be on the CBC in 2003, so I can pick them up at my house. (I don't have cable.) With 22 days until pitchers and catchers report to spring training, the Jays' Cro-magnon abortion of an MLB-centralized web site is still proudly announcing the TV and radio arrangements... for 2002. Thanks for absolutely nothing, you sacks of ape throwup at MLB.com. The CBC announced when it opened the 2002-03 season that baseball would be back, and CBC Sports' baseball page still has a Rogers Blue Jays Baseball logo on it. That looks promising. But the Toronto Star announced last week that cable networks TSN and Sportsnet will carry 145 Jays games between them. That doesn't leave many dates open for the CBC, and the Star doesn't mention the public broadcaster, but who the hell knows? I'm sick of looking for a straight answer from any of these people. I could cheat and use my press credentials to get the truth, but I don't want to go showing them round under false pretenses. Usually.

The Iowa Electronic Markets make a similar error on their webpage, failing to inform readers whether they will be offering winner-take-all futures in 2004 presidential candidates. (IEM is a University of Iowa laboratory exploring the predictive value of artificial markets.) But--lesson #1--the IEM folks, in designing their site, made it very easy for me to dash off an e-mail and ask! And they replied quickly. "We are planning on offering futures markets in candidates for the 2004 presidential election. However, we have no details as to when these markets will be starting as of late." Watch this space. Not this specific space, I mean, but the page generally.

Q: How insular is the world of American chess? A: The newly-crowned 2003 men's U.S. champion is Latvian emigré Alexander Shabalov, and the newly-crowned 2003 women's U.S. champion is... his ex-girlfriend, Latvian emigrée Anna Hahn. Unheralded Anna had an easy draw, but did have to take down reigning champ Jennifer Shahade to nab the title.

In more important news, finest living chess journalist Mig Greengard has a weblog! It's a kid-in-a-candy-store moment for chess fans.

The Null Device links to this nixie-tube clock. Cool! But cooler still, surely, is the nixie-tube digital wristwatch?

Hey, it's an Edmonton sports weblog. Read it during the remainder of the NHL season, then ignore it when Canadian football starts: the poor masochist S.O.B. is a Saskatchewan Roughriders fan. Enjoy watching a quarterback who can't throw for the next couple years, sucker. That shit isn't going to work in a three-down league with midget running backs.

It's heartbreaking to hear this site's boss say the Oilers have "essentially no chance to win the Stanley Cup." Heartbreaking--and irritating. What the hell, dude? They're hovering around #5, #6 in the Western conference, where all the good teams are, so how does that give them "no chance" to win the Cup? Right now they'd be a 20-to-1, 30-to-1 longshot, but if that's "no chance" then most teams in any sport might as well throw in the towel most years. Show a little backbone.

But maybe it's just Edmonton fatalism talking. Weather like this will break a fellow's spirit awful quick... current temperature, at high noon, is -28° Celsius, -18° Fahrenheit.

A weblogger challenges Matt Welch to put down the L.A. Examiner dummy proofs for a second and tell us what he thinks about Iraq--you're our only hope, Obi-Wan. Welch curses audibly, throws down his green eyeshade, whips off the sleeve garters, and writes a highly nuanced, admirably tentative e-mail on the subject. Key points, for me: (1) The "let the inspectors do their work" crowd should ask themselves whether inspectors would be in Iraq at all without American "bullying" (answer: no). (2) It's not necessarily a bad thing--for the world--if some countries seem "unfaithful" and others "faithful" to U.S. foreign policy. (3) "Homeland Security"--why? When the new entity sinks into a swamp of bureaucracy, indolence, and self-defeating political blindness, as the Three-Letter Agencies who were supposed to be doing its work apparently have, are they going to create another new bureau? What do they call that one--the Department of Really Real Intelligence Gathering and Security, And This Time We Mean It? The acronym's going to be a bitch.

Some items!

The first is a fun AP update on "Cc", the cat who has the distinction of being history's first cloned housepet. Surprise! The clone has a completely different personality and appearance from the original article ("Rainbow") down to the colour of her coat. This tells us something we've, er, already known about identical twins for centuries. (There's a full-size photo of the pair interacting here.)

Clones are identical twins: say it with me until it's inscribed on your brain! They're twins! The intentionality of their creation does not change their metaphysical status one whit. And as Rainbow and Cc's fur shows, not all of the divergence between identical twins happens outside the womb. Whether or not "life" begins at conception in the political sense, as the pro-lifers would have it, biological development sure does. Growth patterns are extremely sensitive to initial uterine conditions; in the case of a cat's coat, I think you'd find, though I don't know that they have, that the "fabric" which eventually appears is "knitted" by a very simple genetic instruction set in the DNA--an analog computer program whose output can be radically changed by a bug, glitch, or skip in the hardware.

Item two comes from a member over at FreeDominion.ca, the rabble-rousing conservative news forum that serves as the Canadian analogue to the famous/infamous FreeRepublic.com. I was asked through an intermediary if I could work it into my print column, and while I don't think I can (though tips are always appreciated), I probably reach more Internet-equipped readers here at my site anyway. The news is this Free Dominion presser which makes startling, but independently generated, claims for Free Dominion's traffic levels. (The figures come from Alexa.com, which doesn't have much to say about its proprietary traffic-measurement methodology.)

FD says, for example, that it's blown past Bourque.com, Canada's indispensable Drudge-style single-sheet site. [UPDATE, Jan. 23: more here.] If so, I'm not sure I've got any reason to be glad of it; Bourque gave me a nice boost in the early days of my own site, and still lists me on his Blog Log, although he doesn't go out of his way to make that page easy to find. By contrast, I can find no evidence that I've ever been so much as mentioned at FreeDominion--though, come to that, you'll search in vain for any evidence that I've mentioned them ere now! Perhaps I've been derelict in my duty as a leading Canadian "right-wing" weblogger (cue histrionic rolling of eyes at reductionist, antiquated, misleading political label). Or maybe I just have a visceral hostility to public forums of all sorts... Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I'm not a "joiner".

That reminds me... they've announced the finalists for the 2003 Weblog Awards, an exercise which is far from sufficiently unbogus, but which may, by blind luck, help readers find new daily must-visits. I intend to check out the five "Best Canadian Weblog" finalists real soon now, but I'll point out some Canadian connections in other categories. The team that produces BoingBoing, which is terrific every single day, includes Canada's own Cory Doctorow, freedom fighter, novelist, and freelance genius. He's visibly Canadian, too (in his writing), in that sort of Douglas Couplandy way. BoingBoing is up for Weblog of the Year and a bunch of other prizes.

So is Textism, home of Canadian expat Dean Allen. This is a different, more complicated story: while I have pretty much a non-sexual crush on Doctorow, I've never been able to escape the suspicion that Allen is a loathsome human being... which creates all sorts of issues for me, because I spend 24 hours a day dreading that that's how I come across, too. I end up feeling a weird kinship with the guy (one he'd doubtless disavow with a string of skin-abrading Saxonisms), and I visit Textism once or twice a week. But oh, the smugness, oh, the superciliousness. "Occupation: worker"--in two words on his masthead he manages to convey everything about the brittle, trendoid-left, McSweeney's-wannabe, twattish attitude that seeps out of every serif of his prose. Moving to France, as he did a while back, placed him in serious jeopardy of transcending self-caricature. Yet his dog photos are, simply, one of the finest monuments to love you can find on the Internet; the decency and joy invested in them almost outfaces the pissy self-conscious schoolmarm-ism of his weblog. Thus making the whole shebang, with its paradoxes and tensions, a work of art. And he is a pretty goddamn amazing designer.

So that's two Canadians out of six Weblog of the Year nominees... go us! Canuck photoblogger Heather Champ is also up for a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Sure, I thought adding edge to the Jared Fogle Subway ads was a good idea. But I never thought of going as far as Chris Onstad.

An update on the Craig MacTavish meltdown: it could have been a lot worse. ESPN has the AP wire story on MacTavish's battle with Flames mascot Harvey the Hound, some QuickTime video of the surprise tongue-ectomy, and a photo of trainer Ken Lowe convincing MacTavish--who has, let's recall, served time in prison for homicide--not to beat Harvey to death. You think I'm kidding?

At another stoppage, Harvey leaned over the glass behind the bench which prompted MacTavish to grab the tongue, rip it out and throw it into the crowd. Undeterred, Harvey kept leaning over the glass. MacTavish reached for a hockey stick but was calmed by Oilers trainer Ken Lowe.

Ken, you're one of the best in the business--but strictly between us Oiler fans: next time, let MacT finish the job. Incidentally, you can write to Harvey and let him know what you think of his antics.

There's no free lunch on the Web anymore.

So says Salon editor David Talbot in the L.A. Times, apparently--I saw the quote on Romenesko's Media News, right below a link to the Village Voice's cool story on the Tim Cavanaugh-led Reason.com. If there's no free lunch on the Web, why do I feel so full after chowing down at Cavanaugh's Reason café? Or, for that matter, at Casa Romenesko?

The old "free lunch" saying, as I understand it, actually comes from the days when most American taverns laid out sandwiches and cheese and eggs to attract afternoon drinkers. "There's no such thing as a free lunch" really means that there are ostensibly free lunches everywhere. Talbot is the publican who's stopped serving food gratis, and wants to convince you that the other bars on his block will probably stop doing it real soon, too. Any day now. You just wait.

Unfortunately, the new Salon business model, involving making visitors thumb through "pages" of ads to get to the content, sounds more like a free lunch available only after you've been kicked in the nuts for fifteen minutes.

[UPDATE, January 22: It's all very well to beat a metaphor to death but Ken Layne has actual ideas about how Salon should be run. He is absolutely right about the relevant principles--even the editorial payroll cuts, although I don't even like typing the phrase "editorial payroll cuts". Call it a phobia.]

ColbyCosh.com: always ahead of the curve! This is me writing about Edmonton Oilers head coach Craig MacTavish on December 3:

He speaks very deliberately and seriously, like a man who's had a whole bunch of anger-management classes. Every time some reporter asks him a real stupid question ("Hey, coach, how does it feel to lose to Calgary?") you can feel him pause and gather up overtaxed reserves of strength and patience. You can hear him suck in breath with difficulty, like St. Sebastian pinned to the tree.

Fast-forward: last night MacTavish went ballistic during a loss to Calgary and ripped the tongue right out of the head of Calgary Flames mascot Harvey the Hound. The league's wire report of the incident is misleading: the score was 4-0 when MacTavish attacked Harvey. It was apparently the right move! Eric Francis tells the story entertainingly in the Calgary Sun this morning:

With seven minutes to go in one of the most humiliating efforts in Battle of Alberta history, Craig MacTavish gave the most entertaining tongue-lashing in NHL history.

Furious over a 4-0 deficit and an annoying hound named Harvey who had his dirty paws on the glass behind him, the Oilers coach reached up to grab the mascot's tongue, ripping it clean out of his mouth. Unsure what to do next, he chucked it back into the crowd while security scrambled to reprimand the cagey canine.

Next thing you know, the four-goal lead was dog-gone and the host Flames found themselves one goal away from being, um, tongue-tied.

"I think it was one of those tear-away tongues, otherwise he might have (fallen into the bench)," said MacTavish, tongue firmly in cheek. "When I got Harvey's tongue... that seemed to turn things around." Less than a minute after MacT silenced the hound, the Oilers scored the first of three goals in a four-minute span to threaten what was otherwise the most complete Flames effort since last year's season-opener.

Rick the Miscellanist is unimpressed with my sleeping abilities: he actually dozed through the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens. Well, I can't beat that. My most impressive sleep achievement was to nod right out during a Testament show in 1990; they were opening for Megadeth and headliners Judas Priest, still fronted at that time by Rob Halford and covered by a tacit audience-band agreement not to inquire too deeply into the significance of all that leather. (My memory was of a slightly different lineup, but I defer to the online expertise of Priest fansites.)

Testament wasn't using the same PA as the other bands, it seemed, but rather some nightmarish electric agglomeration of their own childish devising. Even at its best, Testament's brand of metal was noxious and garbled, but on this night they were incapable of generating anything but the unrelenting white noise of a busted hydroelectric dynamo. The waves of 90-dB sklurge had a perverse soporific effect on me; they were almost physically soothing, a sonic massage. When I finally jolted myself awake, Dave Mustaine would, I suppose, have been screeching away about AIDS and nuclear war, as was his habit. I can't really remember; I was there to see the Priest, and they put on a terrific show once they finally displaced their bawling bush-league imitators.

Whoa, I almost forgot that this was an In Other Report Weblogs... embarrassingly, the Ambler has covered some of the same ground that I did in the entry immediately below, and he got to it sooner. He has, generally, been at work on a Very Big Picture of the political future lately. I never find much to disagree with him about; he has a black outlook that almost amounts a perverse optimism. Elsewhere, Jeremy Lott also has some borrowed comedy in his weblog, and the TorranceWatch is 61 days and counting.

Seen in the inbox: a classic reportorial judo slam of Canadian Alliance leader Stephen Harper. The online version of the Calgary Herald story mucks about with psephology, leaving the original lede off the story. In the longer, printed version, Joe Paraskevas kicks off by interviewing two teenagers who came to the town meeting in Stratford:

"[Harper]'s not doing it for me," [17-year-old Rachel] Van Harten said afterwards, as [17-year-old Caroline] Dykstra nodded in agreement. "The emphasis of his platform is on the economic future, paying off the debt and cutting taxes. That's a really realistic emphasis. I think this country could stand to be more idealistic.

"What about people in this society who don't contribute by paying taxes?" Van Harten added. "What about those who aren't upstanding citizens? Where do they fit in, in the future for Canada?"

People who aren't upstanding citizens? Who exactly do you mean, Rachel--embezzlers? Child molesters? You want a party that speaks for auto thieves and crack dealers, is that it?

These youngsters, to their eternal credit, are already grown up enough to despise the Liberals, which puts them ahead of a majority of Ontarians. These aren't stupid people; they drove something like two hours to hear Harper speak, in the apparent hope that he'd inspire them and show them they don't have to spend their lives wasting votes on the Natural Governing Party. Unfortunately, inspiration isn't Harper's stock in trade. The correct term for the "economic future", whose discussion they find so dispiriting, is "the standard of living." People who aren't living on a wage yet often find talk of "economics" dull and non-"idealistic". Once you start having to pay the rent through your own effort, the subject suddenly takes on a new and positively enthralling aspect.

Interviewing legal infants is a game reporters like to play, one they should be discouraged from playing. I suppose if kids are willing to present themselves at a political meeting, they're entitled to be heard; but whether they're entitled to be entirely respected, to the degree of going to them first in coverage of an important political meeting, is another question.

I have to admit, though, that the questionable technique does suggest problems and approaches in reaching out to young voters. No politician can afford to talk frankly about the intergenerational robbery that has gone on in this country (and most other Western democracies, I suppose); the aged and aging are too powerful and selfish to sit still for such a message. But Harper could stand to drop in a pitch to young people about the brain drain. I'll never make a politician, but me, I'd tell those girls to pick a cohort of ten of their brightest, best-performing, most motivated classmates and see what they do with their lives. I think they'll find that between two and four of them will immediately go do an undergraduate degree in the States; another couple will flee there, or elsewhere, for postgraduate degrees; and of the rest, almost all will either start careers in the U.S., or be seriously thinking about it, or be wishing that they could. Canada is a country, now, where talented people are basically made to feel stupid for staying put. This is a real problem, a symptom of the living-standards gap (and the Liberal-inculcated cultural differences) between ourselves and the U.S.; and it's one the Liberals have zero interest in fixing or even acknowledging.

It's good to see Harper working the Perth-Middlesex riding, anyway; I hope he puts in plenty of time there. And he should knock some doors. Harper's not going to suddenly turn into a charmer in one-on-one conversations, as we're always told Al Gore does, but he can at least make a self-deprecating, human acknowledgment of his lack of charisma. People do focus on your ideas in conversation, but political meetings have a spectacular aspect that can't be negotiated out of existence by the most brilliant image consultant. Subconsciously, people in a crowd--even the emotionally cool crowd at a town hall meeting--always put on the crowd, like a mental garment.

Perth-Middlesex is a big deal for the Alliance. The Liberal timeserver there, a retired CF brigadier-general, had to quit in October when his long-evident Alzheimer's disease finally grew too severe to be politely overlooked. There was controversy over his fitness for the seat even before his renomination in 2001, and some local bad feeling towards the Liberals survives. (Right or wrong, there is the supposition that it was cruel and cynical to ask the sitting member, who had a bundle of other personal problems to go with his advancing disease, to go over the top one last time just because of a dearth of local talent.) The search for a Liberal replacement is snarled in squabbling and recrimination; Abbas Rana has a piece on this in the Hill Times. So the government is vulnerable, at least theoretically, and the London area has normally been a good one, as Ontario regions go, for the Alliance. But in the last two elections the CA/Reform nominated some gray ex-Liberal pillar of the community and got nowhere; as I recall, CA support held steady around 9%, a few points behind the Progressives (that's the nickname I want to start using for the Progressive Conservatives--think it'll stick?). This time around the Alliance picked a young female candidate, one who, I gather, is a quite aggressive (not to say rabid) and energetic small-C conservative.

With Harper the only stable leader amongst the four main English Canadian parties--a situation that might have been foreseen when everyone was cringing over the CA's "troubles" last year; settling problems sooner rather than later is good!--there's a sort of "now or never" feeling, amongst some in the CA, about the imminent byelection. As the months go by, the riding is going to turn into a stage. To be sure, we've had this "make-or-break" feeling before. Everybody always underestimates how long we can just limp onward with Canadian politics in the crippled shape they're in now. But it looks like a pivotal act in the drama, anyway, one that could advance the plot if the CA will expend the necessary energy wisely.

Hey, check out who showed up in my visitor statistics today! (Image slightly enhanced for ease of identification.)

It's an honour to see you, Mr. Batman, sir. Reclusive millionaire Bruce Wayne speaks very highly of you... the green pinstripe is, ah, an adventurous look. Love it. Love it.

I've been up all night working, and I'm almost tired enough to use the verb "to blog" non-ironically. But not that tired. I took a short nap earlier and as I was nodding out I thought to myself, "What do you suppose Trent Lott's 100th birthday party will be like? Maybe Senate Majority Leader Jenna Bush will get in trouble for saying he should have been president." Did SNL already do this sketch? I get the coolest ideas when I'm drifting off--maybe I should have a DSL-equipped laptop for my bedroom. Not that I sleep there all that much. I tend to crash at the office a night or two a week, and often when I've got work to do at home, I deliberately pass out on the couch, thinking to myself, if I sleep on the couch, my body will, like, sense that I should be awake, and I won't waste six hours being comatose. Normally I wake up 8-10 hours later feeling like my upper back's been used as a jai-alai fronton.

As a result of the peripatetic sleeping, my bed has become an instinctive locus of only very deep sleep. My mother didn't help matters by buying me new sheets for Christmas that are made from some insanely soft damn material--I think it's the down from goose fetuses whose parents were fed on silkworms, or something. Basically when I crawl into that bed, there's no leaving for a good long time. I have to have my schedule cleared out for the next 48 hours if I even think of lying down there. There could be smoke alarms going off, a cop outside the door counting down from ten into a bullhorn--it wouldn't matter. Even the need to urinate is negotiable when I'm in bed. Can you buy chamber pots on eBay? Were you ever so sleepy that you looked at the toilet and shouted "This isn't progress! THIS IS NOT PROGRESS!"

I see Chicago won a passel of Golden Globe awards last night. Those are the ones picked by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, right? So, basically, this is a question of them not understanding English? They just picked the movie with the nice-looking women in hooker clothes and plenty of singing, I'm thinking. I mean, jeez, these are the people we look to for early Oscar handicapping? Sure, Richard Gere's got a long career behind him; it's not like tipping Jerry O'Connell for the big gong. But I'm still left truly aghast.

(Link from Arts & Letters Daily) The long Julian Barnes essay published Jan. 11 in the Guardian takes for its novel theme Kipling and France. They enjoyed, it seems, a long and mostly mutually contented relationship. But note that Barnes--a novelist of distinction--can't resist taking a detour to Meerut, India to describe a 1922 incident that must have been nearly the most startling in Kipling's life. The relevant entry from Kipling's diary:

Cemetery austere and dignified--in spite of bakehouse crematorium in corner where Hindus had been burned. All sorts burned here inside stone wall, spaced with what should be dignified evergreens (like cypresses) in years to come... Went round graves, spoke to gardeners, etc., etc. I saw grave of Gunga Din, cooly, bearer.

Another one for the aforementioned "unbelievers disgusted at the self-destruction of mainstream churches" file!

I'm probably an even more decided atheist than Orwell was. I'm a militant atheist. But I find it revolting to see the Church of England posing in secular progressive garb, trying to be popular, throwing street parties and going to rock concerts and generally trying to be hip. I find the sight of that completely nauseating for about 1,500 reasons. And I feel sure that Orwell would have felt the same way. Even though the beliefs upon which they base themselves might be absurd and even sinister, there was a certain dignity to the Church of England. It represents quite a long struggle and conflict and a lot of very serious people willing to risk a lot for it, and now it's become a kind of clownish, trendy, almost vote-catching outfit. When I talk like that I don't know whether I sound like a conservative or not, and I don't particularly care.

Christopher Hitchens in the Atlantic, ladies and gentlemen. I think it would be more accurate for Chris to say he doesn't want to know whether he sounds like a conservative.

Warren Kinsella is sending me more traffic. Do check out his January 20 entry, in which he yawps on about a (wholly silly) Alberta Human Rights Commission decision without mentioning that it was thrown out, for procedural unfairness, by the Court of Queen's Bench in December. Our interlocutor apparently intends to overawe the reader with the massive moral authority of a "quasi-judicial body", but, see, actual judicial bodies still outrank the "quasi-" kind. That's how that works. A Quicklaw search would have revealed the facts, but it's not like Warren's a lawyer or anything.

[UPDATE, 7:29 am, January 20: Warren has politely asked me to state for the record that "Warren Kinsella is indeed a lawyer, and a member of the Law Society of Upper Canada." I will repeat for emphasis: Warren really is a lawyer, and a member of the Law Society of Upper Canada. My unreserved apologies to Warren for making a sarcastic joke that may have been lost on readers who do not know that he is a lawyer. Which, in case I have failed to be clear, is what he is. -C.]

The Canada Customs follies continue!