Amusing search-engine referral of the day: colby is great. Agreed!

The Oilers just beat Colorado 1-0 on Hockey Night in Canada. Chronic underachiever Dan Cleary got the goal, then joined Scott Russell after the broadcast to say how much the team likes to hang out after games and "shoot the shit". Hockey players, eh?

Incidentally, what happened to the insurmountable difficulties Canadian teams were supposed to be facing in today's NHL? Only one Canadian team certifiably stinks right now, and as I predicted before the season it's the Calgary Flames. Boy, what's sweeter than that? Having the Flames in the toilet and being right about it: priceless. Anyway, leaving them aside, Vancouver won its franchise-record tenth straight tonight and the Oilers have seven or eight wins in their own last ten. Ottawa and Montreal are both above .500, and Montreal is gonna be a lot better than that if Jose Theodore can reassemble his immense talent, as he should be able to (the question being how long it'll take).

Toronto's right behind, and they've got the players to get above .500, to say the least. I do think it was dumb to put the team in Eddie Billion-Dollar Belfour's hands: he's 37 and he looks washed up to me. (To me, if you're going to count on an aging goalie, you want to choose one whose success is founded on super conditioning rather than emotional intensity.) But he was the Player of the Week a little while ago, and anyway it's impossible for me to be objective about a child-molesting syphilitic Nazi pimp like Belfour. (And besides, grabbing Belfour left them no worse off than keeping Curtis Joseph would have. CuJo was a deity in this town, possibly the most talented Oilers goalie ever, but he's definitely showing dents.)

Basically, I see five of the six Canadian teams as basically OK and four of them as mortal locks for the playoffs. The sick part is that the really good ones, Vancouver and Edmonton, are in the Western Conference, which looks almost as dominant this year as it was in 2001-02. You put either of those teams in the East and they're instant favourites to make the finals, give or take Boston. In the West their playoff status will be in doubt until distressingly late in the year.

Under the circumstances, I'd like to be able to make the case for doing away with conferences entirely and just taking the 16 best teams into the NHL playoffs. But this would create crippling travel budgets all around--more so for Edmonton, stuck as it is up near the Arctic Circle--and, anyway, I find this sort of A-therefore-B reasoning, so very common amongst sportswriters, to be incredibly tiresome. Not that hockey writers have even particularly noticed A in this case, mind you: you get the occasional comment on the West's superiority, but as big a factor as it is in the standings and the playoff races, it should be discussed a lot more.

A classic example of the sheer doltishness of the A-therefore-B approach is on display in the NHL right now. Last year the writers said, with practically one voice, "Boy, offensive totals are way down in the league and a lot of our top scorers are just being annihilated by all the clutching and grabbing in the neutral zone. This is bad for the game--the fans love offence and creativity and we're just not seeing much of that anymore. This is a boring, despicable brand of hockey. There's got to be a league directive about cracking down on obstruction."

I heard this everywhere all throughout 2000 and 2001, and the league listened. In the off-season Andy van Hellemond put out a directive: we're not going to allow defenders to obstruct anyone who's not carrying the puck anymore. That stuff is over. AVH held seminars, sent memos, talked to GMs and coaches--generally made the rule change in a totally exemplary way, with (at first) unanimous support.

So now what's the big story of '02-'03, according to the hockey writers? Of course: whose idea was this insane crackdown on obstruction? The same media vox dei that was complaining about low scoring totals and the fettering of flashy players is now bitching, bitching, bitching about constant stoppages in play, overstuffed penalty boxes, the disappearance of 5-on-5 hockey, and an outbreak of diving designed to attract the new penalties the refs were carefully instructed to call.

Well, the hockey I've seen so far this year is a little better. There is more freedom in the neutral zone. And all this other stuff, all the power plays and diving, was a perfectly foreseeable consequence of the new officiating directives. So anybody who complains now had better be prepared to prove to me that he was arguing against a massive tide of opinion, in 2000 and 2001, that neutral-zone snorefests were the good and natural state of the game.

Ah, well, we're starting to separate the men from the boys, aren't we. A scan of the clutch of Report sites shows five days since Kevin Steel's last update and a solid week for Jeremy Lott, who can claim partial mitigation on grounds of American Thanksgiving. Former staffer Kelly Torrance is in the States too, but she's at ten days and counting; turkey doesn't make anybody that sleepy. Come out and play, guys!

Among the nervier candidates in the game of weblog Survivor, we have The Ambler, Likud voter manqué and AirMiles collector, who is updating frequently. And Rick Hiebert's miscellany is improving, with a mini-catalogue of Canadian memories. Personally I feel the haunting Hinterland Who's Who theme should be piped into public buildings to lower the blood pressure and soothe frazzled nerves.

But. The truly apocalyptic news on this front, dear readers, is at Dave Stevens' place. For years, years, this man has berated me for considering the Macintosh a vaguely jokey, infantile machine, the computing equivalent of a Bose speaker set. Well, guess what. He recently bought an XP box at a discount and set it up in his office, almost on a lark. And guess what happened then.

I have come to realize that Windows XP is a pretty damn fine operating system. I am actually enjoying the use of it. It is easily modifiable with a fairly large selection of custom themes available. It runs efficiently. It only seems to freeze up when I try to run certain older games (which could happen to any system). It opens up most software packages lightning fast. It surfs the internet very smoothly. It has a number of utilities built in to the system that one would normally have to get from third party developers. I love the right mouse button and the third mouse button/roller even more. And, the clincher... it has run almost any game that I have thrown at it, regardless of how old or new that game was.

These are not things Dave says lightly (and don't worry, he gets around to describing the ridiculous problems he has with his beloved G4). The entry is entitled "Sacrilege!", for starters. Other sample quotes: "It's KILLING ME [to say all this]"; "If I were part of any Macintosh user group, I would probably be dead by now for what I have just admitted"; "I don't think anyone but another dedicated Macintosh user could understand how unnerving this all is".

Cult deprogramming is never easy, Dave. Welcome to the ranks of free men.

[UPDATE, December 1: Andrea Harris comments.]

Book links! Alex Good's page steered me to this Guardian Q&A with Booker Prize winner Yann Martel. I think I actually like this Martel guy. He wins me over when he mentions that he couldn't finish The Satanic Verses, although he might have been a little more intrepid in his phrasing: nobody on Earth finished The Satanic Verses.

Good's Book News page is incredible right now. Practically everything on there is interesting. The Giller Prize seems to have been given to a book universally acknowledged to be unreadable. Was the title The Polished Hoe chosen as a very dry joke? Are you kidding me with that?

The crushingly excellent Philip Marchand has a mesmerizing column about the poisonous rivalry between Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye, University of Toronto colleagues who were possibly the two great figures of Canadian letters in the 20th century. McLuhan, a conservative Catholic, despised Frye because he thought he was dabbling in dark occultic forces and perhaps messing about with Freemasonry. Marchand writes:

The feeling was: Oh that McLuhan, what a character.
Funny thing, however. In recent years, with the publication of Frye's diaries and his notebooks, it is becoming clear that McLuhan was on to something. Frye--if not a witness to secret rites at Casa Loma, or part of a network of Masonic conspirators to thwart Roman Catholics in general, and Marshall McLuhan in particular--was deeply attracted to what can only be called the occult.

Tim Blair has an amusing quip from a Sydney Morning Herald letter-writer: "If Canada had oil to speak of," she writes, the U.S. "would have gone to war" over Francie Ducros's "moron" comment. Canada is of course the number one exporter of oil and natural gas to the United States, as longtime readers are aware. When I see the tanks roll past I'll be sure to let you all know.

I also learn from Tim that Mark Steyn's website is now a going concern. Steyn admirers, which will be nearly all of you, take note. I expect Mark's Mailbox to be particularly enjoyable.

Steven Jens writes to ask:

Are [Americans] really most of your traffic? I assumed there were several of us, but assumed that most of your readers were Canadian.

Several?? Jeez, thanks for the vote of confidence, Steve. I get about 500 visitors on a typical weekday, thanks very much, and as best I can determine, at least half are Americans. So when the southern Thanksgiving rolls around, it seems I'm destined to suffer a readership exodus without even the consolation of leftover turkey. Thankful? I got your thanks right here, pal.

Thanks to all the education webloggers who've been linking to me. I didn't start keeping a list from my referrer logs early on, so I'm in no position to reciprocate in anything like a fair way. Erin O'Connor, Brian Micklethwait, and Michael Peach are the ones I recall. I'm sure I'm skipping people. There is a whole subnetwork of folks out there who are interested in exploring educational alternatives and trying to think the thing through. For obvious reasons, the orthodox media doesn't handle this kind of development very well unless there's some political fight it can use as a peg: union vs. school board, school board vs. ministry, what have you.

The "Wal-Mart of meth labs", a cabbie tells me, is located right close to my office. What, no free samples for your neighbours, fellas? Serves you right getting busted then.

The second-highest law officer in Alberta has been accused of witness tampering in her soldier son's court-martial. Heather Forsyth is a articulate, ambitious woman who is probably one of the saner influences on our Legislative Assembly. That said, this quote infuriates me:

"It's before the courts, and I'm not prepared to make any more comments," Forsyth said. "I would hope... that the media respect our privacy. It's been a very difficult time for our family."

Geitner Simmons asks idly if Canada really has its own group of people vilifed as "rednecks". Boy, this is a disconcerting question, even coming from an American. Any Canadian can tell you immediately what province Canada's rednecks live in. The word may actually be more common in this country than it is in the U.S.; there is at least some kind of cultural stigma attached to hatred of the American South, but very little, in Canada, attached to hatred of the blue-eyed sheiks.

Of course, this use of the word "redneck" is really slightly inappropriate, since it's their affluence Albertans are resented for, not their poverty. Here's an entire two-part radio documentary commissioned by the national broadcaster on Canada's rednecks.

I find that when I'm wrung dry after finishing my copy, I start having knee-jerk reactions to everything. "GUILTY IN MURDER, ITALY EX-PM PLEADS FOR JUSTICE," goes the headline at Bourque's place. Justice? Isn't justice sort of the last thing you want if you're a convicted murderer?... I thought "mercy" was the usual menu order at a time like that. And Slate asks "Will Computers Replace Michael Kinsley?" Hey, didn't this already happen? Set the dipswitches to "coy" and "technocratic".

The TorStar reports that John McCallum, the Canadian defence minister who can't tell his Vimy Ridge from his Vichy regime, was barred from an Air Canada flight for drunkenness earlier this month. Man, where do they find these guys? He says, prefacing his remarks with "I believe in being honest", that he had a "few glasses of wine" before attempting to board. This is what politicians always say in these situations. It's always a "few glasses of wine" because beefy middle-aged politicians, as we know, never down a fifth of Scotch in the evenings.

You know what, John? You're a large man; you're not some 100-pound teenaged girl who just had her first sip of Zima. Lots of people have "a few glasses of wine" before boarding a plane; indeed, some consider it essential. They don't get barred by the damn flight attendant. Especially if they're a high-ranking minister of the federal cabinet. I'm going to assume that by "a few" glasses of wine you mean no fewer than 12. Also I'm going to assume that "glasses" means quart jars and "wine" means Wild Turkey, neat.

Can you believe they picked Henry Kissinger to lead the commission investigating the failure to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks? I guess we all knew young Bush had a predilection for these old-school Nixon Administration guys, but... Kissinger? Dude, Mr. President, sir, please reassure me that you're not back on the nose whisky; this is like something "Saturday Night Live" would invent to make fun of you, OK? Where the heck was Karl Rove when somebody drunker than John McCallum suggested this?

I mean, every politician does a few gonzo, out-to-lunch things like this, but it makes me wonder why journalists are so prostrate in awe of "spin doctors". If real doctors made mistakes like this, we'd still be getting our surgery done by barbers. What scares me is the possibility that Henry got the job because he knows about some horrible Paul Krassneresque incident in W's past. "George... George... make me chairman of ze commission or I go to ze Times with ze story about ze crystal meth and ze botched abortion..." Is there a better explanation? To be fair to Bush, he probably did it because the Rumsfeld appointment has worked out so well. Rumsfeld's having this amazing late-life renaissance as the Gary Cooper of Republican bastardy (and I mean "bastardy" here in a sense which Rummy would totally understand, respect, and accept). I keep expecting to wake up one day and hear that Rumsfeld bedded Britney Spears on national television or something. People love that guy!

Speaking of real doctors, a friend sends along a link to a recent episode of BBC's "Horizon" featuring one of the great underappreciated Canadians, the conjuror, skeptic and Macarthur "genius grant" recipient James Randi. The show was an experimental test of homeopathy, one in which Randi's foundation stood to lose a million-dollar prize if the effects of the popular pseudoscience could be reproducibly confirmed. I won't spoil the ending for you.

Hi there. I'm more or less back now, it took me a little longer to get finished than I thought it would. I figure American Thanksgiving is about the best day to ignore the weblog anyway--with everyone in transit back to Podunk, it's a web traffic abattoir. I haven't been at this long enough to know if it'll rebound tomorrow or if everyone will be in a turkey coma. Ohohohoho...tryptophan.

Did you know that the U.S. Army Field Manual on Civil Disturbances is online? Chapter 10 on riot batons contains some good pictures of hippies getting their comeuppance from the man. TAKE THAT, LONGHAIR! Oh, that's gotta hurt.

Before I head home and try to squeeze out the last, incapacitating chunk of my fortnightly copy, a thanks for traffic to Joanne Jacobs, who runs the most essential and readable of all education weblogs. She recommended my half-formed verbal meander on the subject of schools, which suggests strongly that she must read pretty much everything that's out there on the subject. As we already knew.

There's something I left out before when I was talking about home schooling... I had occasion to read a home-schooled student's essay homework one time, a few years back. A couple short written pieces by a young person, aged 11 or 12, as I recall.

What struck me about the homework was this: it was a little bit weird. You could tell that the kid had been indoctrinated with very firm ideas about history and culture, ideas that were just slightly skewed in exactly the way professional educators worry about. This student wasn't some kind of budding Nazi maniac by any means; things were just a little more straightforward, less temperate, than you come to expect from student writing. Not so careful or wimpy.

But the other thing that struck you was that the kid had incredible control of and access to facts. His style of argumentation was more cogent than the average newspaper columnist's, and his prose was ticking along at a very high level, a level that would just knock you out in a public-schooled 16-year-old. For all the occasional solecisms and mild prejudices, this kid had absolutely been given a double helping of the essential tools of thought. By now he's probably about ready to enter university, and he's going to be exposed to ideas which are very different from those instilled by his parents. And I believe based on what I saw that he'll be superbly equipped to sort truth from falsehood and criticize the views he's been given. There was certainly nothing special about his parents, either: they were just super motivated, they got their kid reading early, and they got him using a library. You do that, and you really can't go too far wrong in raising a child, barring some other obvious mistakes (like letting it die of rickets or something).

We can't keep talking about literacy, because I will absolutely flip out and write 15,000 words about it here, and I don't have time. It makes me angry that there is any controversy whatsoever about the subject. But some of that may be prejudice created by my own experiences. And I'm not a parent, so I should probably just shut up about it.

But. Let me say this much. There are only 26 letters in the Roman alphabet. I am very, very, very skeptical of the idea that there are tons and tons of people who can learn to drive a car, make change, and play the piano, but have a mystical "disability" which prevents them from being able to learn and interpret 26 letters in various combinations.

(Warning: extremely Canadian content.) Hey, did you guys know that the Bob Crane sex movie features a scene on the set of Bruno Gerussi's "Celebrity Cooks"? Remember that show? Every day Gerussi and some D-list guest like Richard Deacon would get piss drunk and whip up a ratatouille or some damn thing. Apparently the movie recreates an episode of "Celebrity Cooks" where Bob Crane appeared and started uncontrollably, almost spastically making lewd comments about a woman in the studio audience. Sounds like a typical episode, all right.

It's an interesting casting challenge--whom do you get to portray Gerussi, the magnificent, windburned Graeco-Canadian studmuffin? It turns out John Kapelos--remember the janitor in The Breakfast Club? Of course you do--fits the bill on both ethnic and citizenship grounds. Carl the Janitor is Canadian! That's so cool! And how awesome is it to get to play Bruno Gerussi in a movie?

Generally, my life has been mercifully short of computing disappointments and nuisances. I've had good luck with computers--compared to some, or even most--and twenty years of using them has given me a broad, dimbulby sense of how far you can push things with 'em. But in the past week, just the past week, I've unwittingly (a) downloaded a new version of MSN Messenger that seems to have fewer features than its predecessor AND has forgotten the various places in which I'd stored shortcuts to the old version; (b) downloaded a new "web client", whatever that is, for Adobe Acrobat Reader, which seems to make it, uh, not work anymore; and (c) tried to buy the ad off a friend's Blogspot site, only to learn that, for some reason, Pyra can process Paypal payments from Blogspot members but cannot process them from non-members.

Ah, well, you get what you pay for, especially when it's free.

Primary sources dept.: there's been a lot of talk about reclusive, demented chess champion Bobby Fischer since Rene Chun's account of his mental breakdown hit the Atlantic Monthly website. Perhaps it won't do to mention it, but Bobby has his own presence on the WWW. I don't know whether Fischer maintains the page himself, but the page is in a Japanese domain, and if it's not him, then it's got to be a clone. The language and obsessions are latter-day Bobby to the hideous life. (Who else would have the I-Mode mobile address "u.s._is_shit@docomo.ne.jp"?)

Having been warned that Bobby's page contains really scathing anti-semitism and audio files of his infamous radio interviews, you may or may not choose to see for yourself and even send him a message. A lot of the stuff there won't make sense unless you read the Atlantic piece, or you've been following this slo-mo horror story for twenty years along with the rest of the world's chess fans.

A couple of administrivial matters. First of all, I finally cracked the top 500 on the Myelin Ecosystem Most-Linked List. As I write, I'm at #498, but we'll see how long that lasts; some of my inbound links are transitory hits from main pages. I may have dropped off by the time you go look at the chart.

Second, some of you may have noticed that I have disappeared from the list of Report magazine webloggers here. Don't panic about that: it was mutually agreed, and does not indicate nor foreshadow a change in my employment status.

Alas for the Volokh Conspiracy: the more readers and contributors it gains, the less scrupulous people are about attributing the individual entries to their correct author. Let's try to get these things right, fellow webmasters. This, for example, was written by Stuart Banner:

WHAT WERE THOSE PEOPLE THINKING? It wasn't so long ago that people owned other people as slaves, women couldn't vote, and so on. We all have a list of past practices that seem appalling today. A century or two from now, our descendants will likely think the same about us. Some of the things we do will seem shockingly inhumane. Our great-great-grandchildren will scratch their heads and wonder "What were those people thinking?" But which of our practices are the ones they'll criticize? Eating animals? Psychiatry? Religion?

Well, I've been entertaining an idea about this, actually... maybe you'll think I'm crazy, but my candidate is "schools".

Not just public schools--all schools, or at least all schools that are run on the education-factory model, with 20-plus students per class being taught according to cookie-cutter curricula. Does it ever strike you that the way we teach our children is impractical, antiquated, and, viewed a certain way, sort of shocking?

Turning a child into a citizen is the most important social duty a parent has, qua parent. You would think we'd regard it as something you can't possibly put enough effort into: yet who does the bulk of this work, and how is it done? It's done by a claque of haggard, ill-taught flunkies whose ranks are, thank god, leavened with a few passionate talents. We have no systematic way of telling the good teachers from the bad ones, and most of us don't spend much time doing even casual personal research on the people in charge. (IMPORTANT NOTE: I don't have children.) The teaching profession as a whole loves fads, but is actively hostile to scientific method and valid testing. We hand our kids over to sit in their rows all day--usually in grim industrial buildings--and hope they'll be kept off the streets for a while.

Given these conditions, we may actually be doing a relatively good job of teaching our children. But why are the conditions a given? Why do we debate the ideal class size without challenging the model itself?

When we hear of someone home-schooling their children, we recoil in instinctual horror at the thought of inbred, socially maladjusted kids learning weird and possibly dangerous ideas. But the early evidence from an exploding home-schooling movement is that home-schooled children do very well indeed. They seem to be hugely overrepresented among winners of debate competitions, science fairs, geography bees, and the like. Top American universities fight with each other to get these kids. It seems clear to me that home-schooling is the best choice for most children, under ideal circumstances, if only because it puts the responsibility for that education in the same place where the interest exists. A schoolteacher gets paid whether or not your particular child learns to read. If you're a literate parent you're not going to let that kind of thing slide.

That's a big if; many or most parents probably want a better education for their child than they can provide personally. At any rate, with the economy in its current shape (and I mean "shape" in a value-neutral sense), home schooling won't be practical for a lot of families. But we can, surely, afford private tutors?

See, this is the comical thing: tutors, as opposed to teachers, are doing more and more of the heavy lifting of a failing educational system. We've got these Kumon outfits, these Sylvan Learning Centres and the like, that are teaching math and reading to whole generations of children who are apparently coming out of public schools with no clue how to multiply five and seven. I notice, too, an increasingly lucrative trade in private tutoring for high-school students. I went to high school in the late '80s, and no one I knew was seeing a tutor or was employed as one. By 1995 I had friends who were basically earning a living on these kids. It's just standard now, it seems, for parents to send their kids to high school during the day and then pay someone to actually teach them, on the side.

And when your realize all that, the question becomes "What's the point of the school?" As far as I can tell, the answer is basically that it's already bought and paid for with your tax money.

When government provides a service in a centralized manner, bottom-line efficiency (as opposed to performance) is always going to win an argument against the needs of the client. In the public schools, the existence of powerful teachers' unions creates a third competing interest, diverting funds away from actual education and into the pockets of teachers. The old axiom of schooling is that it's too important a function not to be public, but now surely people are starting to realize that the converse is true: it's too important a function to be public. And, in fact, it's too important a function to be left to a large, impersonal corporation, either. It seems to me you should know your child's teacher at least as well as you know its pediatrician.

The model I see emerging, eventually, is decentralized schooling. Parents should be allowed to withhold tax money from factory schools. They come with expensive appurtenances that can be dispensed with utterly: administrators, sports equipment, lawyers, curriculum directors. If you were designing an education method from scratch you'd never dream of having hundreds of kids in one giant building like a workhouse or a Panopticon prison, would you? You'd probably get together with ten or twelve of your neighbours, people who have kids roughly your child's age, and you'd hire one person to handle their education. Think of the background checks you could do on your candidates, the multi-tier interview process you could organize. Worried about paying the salary of a tutor? Well, I don't know about where you live, but my provincial government spends about $5,000 a year educating a child, according to a back-of-envelope calculation. That's not an unreasonable amount, but if you were given that money and allowed to spend it as you please, do you think you could do better?

That's more or less what I see happening... increasingly radical forms of "school choice", the creation of a free market for tutor labour, innovative community arrangements. Flatter educational structures without all the paperwork. An outflow of schoolwork from the factories to--well, I don't know; it seems to me, just for starters, that there are a whole lot of old people rattling around big houses who would almost be willing to pay to have the place full of children during the day. Or you could simply let a parent with a large house host the class, and allow their child to join for free. A finished basement would be more than large enough, really, for the kind of classes I'm imagining.

Of course, there are tons of niceties to all this. Children with demonstrable special needs would need more funding. Departmental testing, if you chose to keep it, would be expensive and complicated. There would be some absolutely catastrophic failures--as there are now; but no one ever defends a monopoly on the grounds that a competitive market makes mistakes, too, and that's what we have in jurisdictions without serious school choice: a monopoly. That's really why this whole setup seems historically bizarre to me. The early 20th-century voters whose governments created modern centralized schooling--these were the same people who would run amok in the streets at the mention of a "coal trust" or a "wheat trust" or what have you. They were suspicious of monopolies literally to the point of social psychosis--and yet, when it came to education, they thought monopoly was a great idea. (And, for the time, it probably was.)

I'm not convinced we don't need schools, for some reason or other I haven't accounted for. But they seem to me, very vaguely, like an anomaly. They seem like something that we, as a society, just haven't thought through all the way. I see no sign of the school choice, educational accountability, and home schooling movements going away: they're certainly not going to do any such thing. And they're putting pressure, lots of pressure, on an old way of doing things that has obvious, glaring, massive, inherent problems. The historian in me says that this is a recipe for long-term change, but the historian in me also says that you can't guess at the direction of that change. I'm confident, though, that "schools" or whatever replaces them will look very different in 2100, and that people are certain to ask, of us, "What were those people thinking?"

I don't have much for you but I'm always happy to pass on the best of Robot Wisdom. Simon Callow's Guardian review of a new Sir Alec Guinness biography contains some good luvvie anecdotes and tries to pin down Guinness's elusive, understated genius. Guinness looks better every year--he had an ageless style which makes Olivier look rather vulgar (as does one of Callow's anecdotes). Olivier's rep is already rather dented, isn't it? Am I the only one who finds his Hamlet superficial and thinks his Henry V not remotely a patch on Branagh's?

The Guardian also has a preview of Scorsese's much-delayed Gangs of New York, which I've been waiting for eagerly, since it presumably means that the Herbert Asbury book that inspired it will be reissued. Adam Gopnik wrote about Asbury in the New Yorker, what, two years ago? Three? Scorsese's movie has had about five different release dates since then, but we're promised it's coming out on Christmas Day.

[UPDATE, November 26: Aaron Haspel writes to say that there is a "Now a Major Motion Picture" version of the book in paperback. Huzzah and hullabaloo!]

Well, the weblog explosion at the Report magazine has predictably led to nothing but bitterness and recrimination. Yes, Kevin Steel and Dave Stevens are actually arguing about the government pork. Guys, what's really upsetting you? This can't be about surplus MREs.

Dave drops this bomb in his entry:

I don't have a sophisticated palate, obviously, or I wouldn't be ordering salad from Wendy's.

I don't want to add fuel to the fire here, but those Wendy's salads are actually pretty damn good. If you have to order fast food and you're not in the mood to scarf down something that tastes like reconstituted lard, or you're just looking to fend off beri-beri, Wendy's salads are the way to go. Now, me, I like the taco salad: even though the quality control on Wendy's chili is not going to take any gold medals (nor bronze ones, nor even one of those demeaning "participation certificates" they used to make sure every kid got in school), I find the ritual of combining the separate ingredients soothing. Ahh yes, I've got the salsa, the chips, the vegetables... I can combine them any way I like. Look at me, I'm practically Emeril here! BAM!

But the real winner is the Mandarin Chicken Salad, which comes with a packet of almonds and a pretty credible sesame-oil dressing. It's too good to be fast food. I almost feel shame eating that stuff at my desk. My Calvinist ancestors are, somewhere, united in disapproval. They know that my abominable eating habits deserve to be punished by the accretion of a great fist of monoglycerides around my heart. "Aye, boy, we're watching ye. To sin without penalty is to sin twice." Most of the time I'm real good at ignoring those guys, but they get loud about the salad. They all have long white beards and cruel, thin spectacles and they carry knives on their persons, even in the afterlife.

Do you suppose they schedule the Grey Cup for late November just to deliberately add to the abyssal Beckettian horror of the holidays? That's what I'm wondering right now. A lost league final is like a microcosm of life's furious, futile striving--I mean, Beckett only wishes he could make you feel this way. "Hey, you know that ball team you bled for all year? They lost the big game and now the whole season means nothing. Way to have hopes and dreams, idiot."

Incidentally, the Sunday Ottawa Citizen has the Christological angle on the ossuary of "James, the brother of Jesus". Hey, didn't I read about that a month ago on somebody's weblog?

The Grey Cup game was nearly mired in controversy when it was learned mid-week that the singer selected to perform "O Canada" could only perform it in one of Canada's official languages. The Edmonton Journal has the goods on the happy resolution. The anthem was performed in both languages on Der Tag, but all the same, the usual bellyachers were heard from.

Claude Michaud, a third-generation Albertan of French heritage, called the incident a black eye for Edmonton. "In Alberta we are still behind the times," said the Legal-area farmer. Like other callers, he said organizers failed to understand the need to be gracious hosts when a team and fans from Montreal visit here.

I cordially invite Mr. Michaud to go stick his face in a baler. "In Alberta we are still behind the times," indeed. If you want to accuse the Grey Cup organizers of being short-sighted or politically inept, do that: you'll be right! But don't talk to me about "the times". Like it or not, the dream of a Canada where everyone is totally bilingual has been an expensive, antagonizing failure with abominable implications for national unity and the civil service. Bilingualism is not the future; it is not Utopia. It is at best an annoying but necessary political accommodation. It is never going to create a Canada where everybody spews French and English with equal ease; at best it can only create a bilingual elite, and that is exactly what it has done, whether or not it was the real intention.

I'm not saying, here, that the existence of a bilingual elite is a bad thing, but can we drop the Marxian fantasy at long last? Can we stop pretending we are progressing inevitably toward a double-tongued New Jerusalem? I mean, Mr. Michaud knows that Quebec has done seven hundred times as much to impede and discredit bilingualism as Alberta. He knows this, but he bashes his own province in print anyway. It suits him, serves his interest, to have us feel bad about not speaking French as readily as we ride a bike. He should be ashamed to treat his fellow Albertans this way. He could have told the Journal "I'm glad the committee has decided to be a good host, and make this gesture on behalf of the enduring and civilized dream of a bilingual Canada." Instead, what does he say? Basically, "Fucking Albertans--they'll never change." So angry, still, after three generations? Does he even know he's allowed to leave Alberta if he likes?

One of the Agenda Bender's secret identities writes with a selection of best bits, if that's the term, from the Miss World riot coverage. He (if that's the term) particularly recommends AllAfrica.com's on-scene backgrounder.

Aaaahhhhh. What? For this I waited six years for the Eskimos to get back to the Grey Cup? I've got no link to the game story yet but they ended on the wrong side of a 25-16 score. That score's a little misleading: it was 18-10 Als with a minute left and the Esks got the major on a little rainbow into blown coverage on Ed Hervey. They missed the two-point convert and Jermaine Copeland ran back the onside kick for an irrelevant TD. So it was actually a classic game. I hate those most of all.

Oh, look, they're giving the Outstanding Player trophy to Anthony Calvillo. He missed 11 consecutive throws in the second quarter, does that sound like an outstanding player to you?

I was right about the cold and the turf: it held the Eskimos back. Avery was too hurt to run; I think he finished with a negative total in rushing yards. Ray couldn't hit anybody in the first half, and Coach Higgins was real slow to pull Avery and replace him with Troy Mills, a veteran import-for-hire who set the game on fire as soon as he came in. Higgins is going to be second-guessed to death for that. He's also going to get scrutinized for going for it on third-and-10 at the Als 40 with six minutes to go, but that, for me, is the right call in that situation, eight points down. You need the major score, go get it. Having good field position isn't going to put you on the right side of the scoreboard with 360 seconds to go.

Ahhhhh, it was a mess. A crude, sloppy battle of gimpy offences, questionable reffing, and wondrous defence on both sides. The sick truth is that the Eskimos win this game if it's held in any other stadium in the league. An embittering thought. The only plus right now is that there won't be a riot outside my front door. Nothing to do but enjoy the silence, I suppose.

...I really should be eating instead of weblogging, I guess; I haven't had a bite all damn day. Fortunately I'm going to the Savoy, did I tell you about that place? Last time I was there I asked to see a dinner menu and I was practically bowled over by the pretentiousness of it--it's one of those bars where you don't order fries, no no no no, you order pommes frites. The dish that really stood out for me was the duck tacos. Yes, I think we've found the outer limits of culinary fusion absurdity, folks: duck tacos. We're going to take the richest, most difficult-to-prepare game bird known to mankind... and stick it in a taco. We're just that nuts.

But, having poked my fun at the Savoy's menu, I have to give you the punchline: I scanned the menu and picked out the tiropita, described therein as "goat cheese in phyllo pastry", and lo and behold--it was the tastiest meal I've eaten in 2002. By a mile. It was hot and salty with a tomato-spinach-herb mush all over it that was good enough to be a separate dish...I was having these girlish little grunting foodgasms as I ate. So if you're in Edmonton you could give that a try (warning: not cheap). I'll probably order two of 'em tonight. Or maybe I'll just say to the waiter, "Look, keep 'em coming until you see me fall asleep, right?"

Anyway, I've almost gotta run. I may be back later tonight, but don't expect much from me on Grey Cup Sunday. It looks as though my original plan to go buy a scalped ticket to the game is going to be impractical; I'd hope to be able to get away with something in the $100-$120 range but it sounds like I'd be looking at $150 for any kind of a seat. So I'll be here at home, watching in agonized silence.

I'm not optimistic. It'll be near-freezing for the game, but the personnel turnover in the CFL is so fast that that's not necessarily an advantage for the home club. Sometimes the cold weather hurts the Eskimos (e.g., the 1977 "Staples Game"), sometimes it helps them (e.g., the sweet 1993 Western Final; I still remember with satisfaction the sight of Calgary's quarterback--you may have heard of him, guy named Doug Flutie--frantically trying to warm his frozen little American piggies on the sideline). This time, I think it's bound to hurt them. Montreal's quarterback, Anthony Calvillo, has experience playing football in Canada in November. Edmonton's quarterback, rookie Ricky Ray (say that five times fast), doesn't.

On the other hand, rookies sometimes do counterintuitively well in Grey Cup games: Rick Cassata won in '73, and while J.C. Watts didn't win in '81, he certainly outperformed Warren Moon, and that was just ten months after Watts was the star in the Orange Bowl.

The basic problem is that the guy who won us the Western Final, John Avery, is hurt. How hurt he is exactly, nobody wants to tell us, but the Eskimos activated a spare import RB yesterday, so that doesn't look good. Granted, the Alouettes' star rusher, Lawrence Phillips, is a scratch too. But if neither side can establish a running game in the cold, it's got to be an aerial battle, and while the Esks have a better receiving corps on paper, Calvillo frightens me. He's a terrific quartz (attention: Canadian schoolboy lingo!) with a score to settle. Incidentally, if any American scouts are reading this, Calvillo should be playing in the States: take our QB, please! I'm not saying he's a guy who should obviously be starting in the NFL, like Warren Moon was, but I think he could definitely have a nice little Neil O'Donnell-type career if anyone wanted to take a flyer on him. I don't see any other passers in the CFL who are at that level yet.

Anyway, I'm rambling and I gotta go. See you later...

I guess I have time for one composite entry before I go to the bar. Of most immediate relevance is Damian Penny's response to the point I made earlier, which is that when Muslims start rioting in a majority-Muslim country on instructions from Muslim leaders, pulling people out of cars and demanding that they recite the Koran or face the bloody consequences, it is odd to wait a couple of days until the oft-slaughtered minority Christians fight back and then say "See? Both religions are equally prone to violence." The observation may be true (though I've argued ad nauseam that it isn't), but the occasion for it is, I think, quite inappropriate.

I do wish I'd kept the link, but I saw one news report on the violence which said the Muslim rioters were chanting "Down with beauty". Whether you suspect we're fighting a whole religion or just one perverted manifestation of it, this clarifies what's at stake, anyway. Hang on, let me post this and I'll continue in another entry...

Uh... OK, I don't have access to my e-mail account, and the private forum I'd normally post this on is having one of its standard late-night gas attacks, so I'm going to post an insider-interest item here. You guys (they'll know who they are) should check out the Nov. 20 L.A. Times profile of Mike Fleiss. Luke Ford also has some background--that's where I got the link from. Luke doesn't have in-page links, though, so you'll have to scroll down and keep your eyes peeled.

Hell, the rest of you may be interested in that stuff too. In fact, if you have a popular web site you may have talked to Fleiss... he's a hustling TV producer who, as Luke notes, "proved adept [in the '90s] at canvassing the country for videotape, cold-calling and trolling the Internet for footage to license". Now, as producer of The Bachelor, he's suddenly one of the biggest stars in TV production. Man, who saw this coming? His name is on a lot of those Fox Network shows everyone makes fun of--"World's Most Whimsical Arsons", "When Dingoes Go Rabid", that kind of thing. He appears to have split with his old shock-TV buddies and is now a single-handed hurricane force of cultural nihilism. ALL HAIL FLEISS! (And yes, he is related, distantly, to Heidi.)

Everyone's thrilled that the "left rail" is back on Poynter Online's layout (here's a link to Romenesko's Media News, the Poynter feature generally worth reading). Poynter, a site mostly full of tools for journalists who are tools (the navel-gazing kind), underwent a controversial redesign that I rather like. I suspect the dropping of the beloved left rail was a deliberate tactic--a complaint magnet, if you will. You'd be foolhardy to go through a massive redesign without sneakily giving folks one obvious thing to bitch about. People don't like change, so if you must fart around with a layout that works (N.B.: YOU DON'T ACTUALLY NEED TO, DUMMY), then leave yourself one thing you can and should back down on. That way, the busybodies who think your page is a public utility can feel they've accomplished something when you give in to Popular Demand.

All Religions Are Created Equal Dept.: Damian Penny's latest post on the Miss World riots, which have now, after 100-plus deaths, forced the transfer of the pageant from Nigeria to London, quotes a letter from Rabbi Michael Bernstein of Longmeadow, California:

I read your blog regularly and am most often in agreement with your take on how endemic the problem of Islamic extremist fascism is. However, the Nigerian situation also illustrates one of your other (sometimes less appreciated claims): the [Muslim] religion is not itself the problem and other religions are not by their nature immune from abuses. In Nigeria the riots seem to have been joined by Christian youth.

Er... that's certainly an interesting way to characterize the situation. Apparently if you rise up against Muslim rioters who are protesting an anti-Muslim newspaper editorial by killing Christians, that means you've "joined" the rioting. Here is how the Independent describes the scene:

Groups of Muslims and Christian youths armed with stones, sticks and guns fought pitched battles and destroyed churches and mosques, in a wave of bloodletting. The streets of Kaduna were littered with burnt-out cars and tyres, and witnesses counted dozens of bodies on the streets. The Red Cross put the death toll at 105 yesterday morning but witnesses spoke of many more killings yesterday. Despite a 24-hour military curfew, the fighting spread from Muslim to Christian districts as Christian mobs retaliated for previous attacks.

I hold no brief for mob behaviour, but these riots originally started the minute the mosques let out after Friday prayers. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between "retaliation" and self-defence. Rabbi Bernstein is peddling the sort of moral equivalence Damian Penny has spent the past year correctly denouncing when it's applied to the Palestinian-Israeli mess. Yet in this context it becomes, in Damian's words, an "important point." I respectfully disagree. At the very least this is a clueless, self-serving characterization of a complicated situation. There is no big mystery about who started this mess (Nigeria's Muslims), when it started (with the offending editorial), and why (because if you make jokes at the Prophet's expense in a Muslim country, cities burn).

[UPDATE, November 23: More here with a link to Damian's reply.]

The Ambler locates the worst metaphor ever! Rick Hiebert remembers the Fog Bowl! Dave Stevens is on the cutting edge of forklift safety! Kevin Steel is eating surplus government pork!

You won't want to miss that last link. Actually... Steely just dropped some of the government pork on my desk. "Here's your free sample," he said, laughing. I'll review it when I work up the courage to eat it. It's a foil pouch inside a plain brown box whose exterior reads

PASTA & SPICY PORK/MACARONI SAUCE EPICEE EXP: 06 2003 EST 119

Intimidating, and possibly trichino-tastic, but I'll try anything once!

Let's stipulate for a moment that Wayne Gretzky was not the greatest player ever to step on the ice. Can we at least agree that the '80s Oilers had two of history's five best players on the roster? Perhaps this too would be controversial, but Mark Messier is helping his case at 41 with an unbelievable comeback year. Tonight his 10th goal in 22 games got the Rangers out of the Meadowlands with a point. (Funny, I thought the league was supposed to have breezed by the lame-o's from the "diluted" '80s...)

The Calgary Herald's George Johnson has a touching paean to Messier over at ESPN.com. And I'll add this observation: yes, Gretzky is The Great One, but if you polled the fans to find the best-loved Oiler who ever pulled on the jersey, it would be absolutely no contest.

Al Gore has flip-flopped and now supports a single-payer national health care system like Canada's.

Kaus reported this earlier in the week but I've just now gotten to wondering... how exactly is the U.S. going to adopt a single-payer national health care system "like Canada's"? The United States is missing an essential component of the Canadian system--namely, a large neighbour to the south with a working economy and a market-based health system.

Where do nine-tenths of all technical innovations in medicine come from? The United States. When rich people and politicians in Canada get sick, do they stay home and wait in line in Canada? No indeed: they go to the United States. When working- and middle-class oldsters in Canada can no longer stand the pain of waiting for hip or knee surgery, do they start thumbing through Final Exit? No (or at least I hope not): they dip into their savings and go to the United States. When Canadian health authorities close to the border can't find an expert surgeon to do a rare emergency procedure, or they just plain run out of acute-care beds (ain't rationing daffy?), where do they turn? To the United States.

U.S. health care serves as safety net and relief valve to Canadian health care. So tell me, Bizarro-President Gore, what country is going to prop you up when you Sovietize American hospitals? Mexico? Hong Kong? Japan?

So somebody very high up in Jean Chretien's PMO thinks George W. Bush is a moron. Let me repeat that with the appropriate emphasis: somebody very high up in Jean Chretien's PMO thinks George W. Bush is a moron. Pause. Blink. Blink. This is a bit like being confronted on the subway by an aggressive subnormal who's off his meds, n'est-ce pas? "You're stoopid. Hey. You over there. You're really stoopid. Huh huh huh."

Americans probably shouldn't get too upset about this, considering that about 10-20% of the American public and a good 40% of its commentariat seem to agree with whoever said Bush was a moron. Nonetheless it's one of those little embarrassments that goes along with being Canadian. What interests me is that the whole kerfuffle arose over defence policy, of all things. Senior Liberal officials accuse Bush of being a moron while themselves deliberately acting as if the Canadian public is stupid--i.e., trying to convince us, against the universal testimony of soldiers, military experts, and a Liberal-led Senate committee, that our armed forces are appropriately funded, well-equipped, suffering no morale crisis, and ready to fight anywhere, anytime.

Me, I'd rather be--or vote for--a moron than a liar.

Andrew Sullivan writes today:

Wellesley, after much trauma, is going to invite anti-Semitic poet, Amiri Baraka, to speak there as well. (The compromise at Wellesley: Baraka won't be getting an honorarium.) Here's a suggestion: why don't the Ivy League colleges pool their resources and organize a special conference entirely for Jew-haters and anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists? All in the cause of free speech, you understand.

I won't try to parse that particular sarky reference to free speech, but I do have two points to make, since I've been lucky enough to have on-the-ground humint about this chapter in the Travels of Amiri.

The first is that a black student group asked various departments at Wellesley to underwrite Baraka's honorarium and was, rather courageously I thought, turned down. Since Baraka is therefore visiting Wellesley on his own dime, and on the dimes of students who willingly raised money to have him come out, where's the element of "compromise"? The university has acted in full accord with the principle that it won't pay to bring demented racists to campus to hector the students, and it has acted in full accord with the principle of free speech. How's that a compromise? Funding a visit and allowing a visit are two separate things.

The second, and more important point, is this: Andrew left some relevant information out. Namely, that he spoke on the Wellesley campus twice last week, with academic sponsorship. I think this is all to the good, but doesn't it fall into the category of interests one might want to declare when discussing who's invited, or not invited, to Wellesley?

Alexandra at Out of Lascaux hadn't heard of Edgar Leeteg. Blowhard Michael seemingly hadn't heard of Leeteg either. Can it be that neither of them takes Juxtapoz, Robert Williams' magazine of lowbrow art, pop art, kitsch, contemporary surrealistic painting, posters, graffiti, tatts, SF book covers, and outsider art? Say it ain't so!

D.C. Pierson writes to say he met Palahniuk at a signing--the story's pretty funny, especially the part where Palahniuk sees he has a sign-language interpreter and starts getting her to translate dirty words.

D.C. says, and I thought the advice worth sharing, that "pretty much all his other books are like [Lullaby], to one degree or another. I love the man to pieces, but he's a bit formulaic. It's not nearly as crappy a formula as say, John Irving, but it's there... If you read only one other Palahniuk book, make it Survivor."

I have to note that I didn't actually use the word "formulaic". Hell, come to that, Jane Austen was "formulaic". The Aristotelian unities are a "formula", sonnet form's a "formula". I'm never going to use that word as a pejorative.

From our Islam Means Peace Dept., the idea to hold the Miss World Pageant in Nigeria is looking just super-bright right now. A Nigerian newspaper editorialist made a little joke the other day after some mullah asked rhetorically how Muhammad would have reacted to a beauty pageant (or "disguisting parade of nudity", as it's known in the Abode of Peace). "He probably would have picked out a wife," the unnamed leader-writer answered, this ensuring himself a place in the annals of satire.

[UPDATE, November 27: Of course, this should read "herself", and Miss Isioma Daniel is correctly described as a fashion reporter. Glad I'm not the only one who blew that.]

Despite a frantic apology from the editorial board, the newspaper's offices were razed. Now bombs are going off at airports and 50 people have been "stabbed, burned, or bludgeoned to death" in rioting.

That oughta teach non-Muslims to crack wise about the Prophet. Everybody knows the girls in the Miss World pageant are all way too old for him anyway.

I left you hanging for a day or so there, didn't I? Maybe you thought I'd gone and shot up the West Edmonton Mall in a Palahniuk-induced anti-consumer rage. No way, man, I gotta wait a couple weeks until the Christmas shopping is at its peak. That place gets damn full--you could start a second Hillsborough with the right firecrackers, which would be far more Palahniuk-esque than actually shooting anybody.

Truth be told, I had real work to do, and the traffic was really sagging yesterday so I was also kind of curious to find the bottom of my market. My stats are publicly accessible; have you ever noticed that most weblogs' are not? Lot of cowards out there. I guess the Web is all about freedom of information, except when it comes to the dirty little secret of how unpopular you are! Hah! Anyway, there should be more entries tonight.

Hey, I read Chuck Palahniuk's Lullaby a couple days ago. This is the first Palahniuk I have read. I am not going to give you a review, but a series of bulleted points.

· All the characters basically talk in the same casually apocalyptic way Brad Pitt does in Fight Club. Wounded, vengeful, vandalistic. Basically Palahniuk really seems to enjoy imagining the slow, sickening demise of civilization, and thinks either that everyone else does, too, or that there's no point in even trying to create a character who thinks in a different way from oneself. He could be right either way. We all have those "humanity is a cancer" moments, no? Me, I have a lot of them, so I liked the book.

· The jacket promises that Palahniuk "reinvents the supernatural thriller for our times." Well, I guess Stephen King can just go to heck then. Stephen King could actually have written this book in a particularly inspired moment. "Carl Streator" and "Helen Hoover Boyle" even sound like names he'd come up with for characters.

· The book begins with a useful but unoriginal conceit: a mysterious poem that, when recited, kills the hearer. This mutates quickly into a useless and unoriginal conceit: after a while the protagonist memorizes the poem and can kill anyone merely by thinking about them, by sort of flexing his brain in their direction. Bet you've never heard that one before. (It's a Gen X Scanners!) A lame way, this, to go about reinventing the supernatural thriller. Reinventing the wheel is more like it.

· The ending is kind of exciting and satisfying, and Palahniuk does have a gift for the gruesome, as we all know. A movie of this book would reach the same audience as Fight Club, if it was done equally well.

· A friend of mine was saying the other day that she read a few of John Irving's books and realized pretty quickly that she hadn't needed to go to the trouble. Once you read The World According to Garp, she figures, there's really no need to read the rest. I strongly suspect Palahniuk is more or less like this--someone with a sensibility so unique and incandescent that it's the fact it exists that's special, and there are equal and indistinguishable helpings of it in all his books. But I'll give one of the others a try if a review copy happens to cross my desk, which is what happened this time. Oh, that reminds me, thanks for the book, J-Lo.

Interesting little review of a new Max Beerbohm biography here, at the Weekly Standard. I'm afraid I must object to the subhed--everybody knows that P.G. Wodehouse is the world's greatest minor writer. And this made me laugh:

He [biographer N. John Hall] recognizes that Beerbohm tended to underrate Shaw--he had a real antipathy to geniuses, whom he thought "generally asinine"--and to overrate Lytton Strachey.

I think Beerbohm can be forgiven for being brave enough to underrate G.B.S. when he was the barmy, bearded little tiki of the whole intellectual world. Shaw's reputation has been contracting into a black hole since his death, and still has not reached an appropriately modest size. It is even more unlikely that one could seriously overrate Lytton Strachey; I am in fact tempted to disbelieve outright in the possibility.

Aw, man, Ben Affleck is People magazine's "Sexiest Man Alive"? I swear one of these years I'm gonna walk off with that thing. Actually, I was far more jealous last year when Ben also defeated me in People's "Drunkest Man Alive" competition.

I still remember when People started naming Sexiest Men Alive--this was back in the dark time, when Gabe Kaplan and Elliot Gould would have been leading candidates. I always find it amusing when the media arrogates privileges like this to itself. "Congrats, Ben, you're the Sexiest Man Alive!" Oh yeah? Did you use science to calculate that? Did you really analyze every male adult now alive to ensure that nobody in Chandigarh or Arkhangelsk is sexier than Ben Affleck? No, a bunch of magazine editors got together and just made this crap up. Unfortunately, I am a magazine editor and I know exactly how smart people like me are. You are BUSTED, People!

Really what's interesting is the oh-so-American treatment of "sexiness" as if it were a scalar quantity, like how fast you can run the 40-yard dash. No one raises the question "Sexy... to whom?" There are probably constituencies of women who think John C. Reilly is the Sexiest Man Alive. At the very least, there should be a Sexiest Man Alive To Gay Guys issue, shouldn't there?

Yeah, all right, I supposed you've all heard about Michael Jackson's latest stunt: dangling his son from the fourth floor of the Adlon Hotel in Berlin. This late-breaking New York Daily News piece has the most recent details. There's just so much here to be creeped out about--every re-reading of the story turns up something new.

Laughing like a loon, Jackson clutched the wriggling tot with his right hand while struggling with his left to adjust a white towel hiding the baby's face.

I can almost imagine a kind of mean, thoughtless dad dangling his kid over a fourth-floor balcony--while holding him very tight with both arms. Here, you've got the guy awkwardly cradling the kid in one arm while "struggling" to keep his face hidden in a towel with the other. Apparently not letting the child die was just behind keeping its face covered, as a priority. In a way, the towel's more fucked-up than the dangling. What's the deal there, Mike--you want to show your kid to the crowd, but not show your kid to the crowd?

This is a guy whose logical apparatus has failed at the most basic level. There's a lot of talk about Michael's repeated facial surgeries, but you can understand those as an extreme manifestation of the same vanity and insecurity we all share. And the alleged homosexual pedophilia--well, Michael's got daddy issues and lost-childhood issues. I'm not giving him a pass by any means, but I can understand that business too. I can't really understand displaying your child to a screaming mob with his face muffled. As for the dangling, protecting your child is reptile-brain stuff. It's supposed to be in your DNA. How far gone to you have to be to act this weird, this contrary to healthy human intuitions? It's actually a whole new level for Michael; he's gone from megalomaniac kiddy-diddling creep to malicious alien retard.

But the weirdness isn't confined to Michael: reporters William Boston and Corky Siemaszko tell us that

Jackson's stunt left observers on the ground and others who watched on TV aghast...

Now you're aghast? There were two hundred people there to hang around outside Michael's balcony to scream their love at him. I am fucking gobsmacked that there are still two hundred people in the whole world who weren't already repelled by the crumbling anti-social has-been. Are these the "German nihilists" we saw in The Big Lebowski? Why would anyone who thought Michael's behaviour up till now has been OK be horrified by some triviality like dangling a child over a balcony?

I'll just mention one more laugh line in an article full of them--this is from the statement released after the incident:

"I made a terrible mistake," Jackson said. "I got caught up in the excitement of the moment. I would never intentionally endanger the lives of my children."

Uh...Michael...you just did endanger the life of one of your children. We saw it. If you didn't do it intentionally, can you maybe tell us what planet is giving you your instructions?

OK, I have a couple of public service announcements to make about the Grey Cup. This entry's very skippable.

First of all, concerning Canadian football on U.S. TV. I had a surly e-mail from our Bermuda correspondent, tax exile and Penn State fan Jefferson N. Glapski. He is upset because he's going to be golfing or some damn thing on the weekend and he doesn't want me to mention any Grey Cup results until the Thursday after the game, which is when he'll finally get to see it down there. For the sake of my other readers, I have told him to suck rocks. But Jefferson, ever gracious in the face of a brushoff, helpfully mentions that a hawk-eyed American viewer can find CFL action on TV.

The CFL is occasionally shown on DirecTV on Channel 613, Fox Sports World, when they aren't showing that soccer crap. The big problem is that it conflicts with college football [on Saturday].

As Gregg Easterbrook has pointed out, only a fraction of U.S. homes have the pristine southeast view required to pick up DirecTV. If you have a local AmericaOne affiliate you may be able to catch Sunday's Grey Cup, and JNG conjectures that a delayed telecast may also be available for the snowbirds on Florida's Sunshine Network. George Steinbrenner's YES Network (which, alas, is devoted to the Yankees rather than the progressive rock combo) is running the game on Monday.

Man, nobody cares about all that. What a pisser that the CFL is too low-rent for even ESPN2. It's the second-strongest football league in the world, you fuckers! Is Title IX forcing you to run pre-season women's college basketball instead??

All right, on to the more important announcement. The CBC is running classic Grey Cup games late at night all week. Right now I'm watching the very cool '73 game featuring Ottawa and the old Ray Jauch Eskimos. (Walrus mustaches! Guys playing offence and defence! This rocks!) Tomorrow night is the 1981 Grey Cup featuring the same teams.

Oh you bet I'll be taping that one. Eskimos QB was Warren Moon, maybe you've heard of him. Ottawa's rookie QB was future U.S. Rep. Julius Caesar "J.C." Watts, maybe you've heard of him too: he won the car as Outstanding Player that day. I thought I'd written about the '81 game somewhere on the site, but it seems not. Details of that game are available on this page about Watts, who left Canadian football with the admiration of the whole country. That Eskimos team is maybe the greatest ever fielded in Canada (it went 14-1-1) and its comeback from 20-1 at the half in the Grey Cup was... well, I was ten and I remember every detail. And they're replaying it tomorrow so I can tape it, in the future! Thank you CBC!

In Other Report Weblogs, The Ambler has an entertainingly lacerating piece about Vancouver politics and Kevin Steel dot org has been busy with the National Question and "hitchhikers". He didn't post on it, but Rick Hiebert of Rick's Miscellany thinks my readers will be interested in this current Times of London story about the fate of some art that barely survived the Second World War--namely the Mantegna frescoes of the Ovetari Chapel in Padua, which have been left in the condition of a half-completed jigsaw puzzle. I know those are important paintings. If you imagine a Muybridge-style film of the great leap from the symbolic medieval imagination to the seeing-style of the Renaissance, the Mantegna bible scenes are where the feet have just pushed off and the body of Western art has maximum kinetic energy.

This Ann Coulter column on the future of the Democrats is hilarious. (Link via Kaus, who calls it "clarifyingly vicious". Ah, now there's a fellow who is qualified to perform marriages between adverbs and adjectives.)

Did it ever occur to you that three of the four major North American pro sports are Canadian? I'm sure some cultural-cringing commentator has pointed this out, but ice hockey developed somewhere in Canada (Kingston, or Montreal, or possibly Windsor, N.S.), basketball was invented by a Canadian, and "football" in the United States meant what we now call soccer--unlikely as that sounds--until a gang of Canadians came to Harvard and showed the ivy-stained snoots that picking up the ball and tackling people was kind of fun.

No wonder Americans are forever devising stuff like Slamball and American Gladiators. The unconscious humiliation may even explain the otherwise puzzling need to film Rollerball twice over. Keep at it, guys, one of these weird bastardizations will catch on eventually.

Yesterday I was catching up with some of the recent stuff from Jed Purdy, the enfant terrible who wrote that book decrying pervasive irony in popular culture. I believe it was called Every Time You Sneer, God Kills a Kitten. Purdy's been writing for The American Prospect, which reminds you how courageous his message really was. Advocating deliberate irony-impairment makes it hard for a magazine like TAP to hire you without attracting even more ridicule than it does already. But Purdy wrote what he thought and damned the career consequences.

And you know, it's not like he wasn't right. A friend of mine used to point out, and this was maybe ten years ago, that you can scarcely say to somebody anymore "Hey, man, that's a nice shirt." You're likely to have a fight on your hands. To say something positive about almost anything, you have to adopt a sort of oratio obliqua. "I don't want to come off as some sort of guy who wears pajamas with the feet in them here, but Belle and Sebastian really are a lot of fun." So, yeah, Purdy was right to identify some sort of drift towards a default nihilism in our style of discourse. I don't know that he succeeded in proving that it wasn't just a symptom of something else. David Foster Wallace said it all first, anyway, and much more credibly.

Purdy's dissection of libertarianism in TAP, apparently dating from 1997, is disappointing. There's exactly one key phrase about libertarianism--the rest is more or less dispensable, despite the title of the article being "The Libertarian Conceit". Libertarian dogma, he says, rests on "a persistent, willful obtuseness to the reality of economic coercion." That's his core objection: everything else is just a restatement of that one idea. And considering Purdy's reputation as a miracle-working autodidact, it's pretty old news.

Repunctuated slightly, I can almost accept his formulation of the libertarian ideal: we are "wilfully obtuse" to the "reality" of "'economic coercion.'" An extra set of scare quotes, you see, is needed in that last case. The truly obtuse person is one who ignores distinctions which do exist, and are relevant: and simply by mashing the words "economic coercion" together, that is what Purdy's doing. He's accusing libertarians of pretending to see a crucial difference between economic power and political power. That way he's spared the trouble of specifying the distinction himself, saying whether he thinks it's real.

I must plead guilty to having been soaked in libertarianism as a naive young man, but now I've been in the working world, the real world, for a good ten years. Nothing I've learned since has convinced me, even in a dim shorthand sort of way, that a boss is the same thing as a cop. Do I worry about losing my job? Fuck, only round the clock 365 days a year. But that doesn't indicate to me that the genuine power my boss has over me is the same as the power a cop has over me. If I get sacked I'll have to find another job. If I get cracked on the head with a copper's nightstick... well, now, what's the analogue, exactly? Do I go get another head?

Laissez-faire capitalism may generate transitory monopolies by accident, or so the theory goes; I've sure never seen one in real life that wasn't propped up by the government power whose levers Jed likes to fondle. (I don't hold, with Schumpeter, that capitalism tends inherently toward monopoly, and I don't think many people do nowadays.) But government is a monopoly by nature and definition, a monopoly of legally applied force. The libertarian insight, or perhaps the right word is "conceit", is that it makes no goddamn sense to spend energy, or very much energy, fretting over self-correcting monopolies on economic power in the marketplace. Government is an eternal monopoly on true coercion. For this reason, a hundred actively evil CEOs are less dangerous than one well-meaning government.

But I'm only telling you what you've heard before. Most people understand the difference between trade and force: you'd have to be obtuse not to.

It's easy to indict the race of women on a charge of spasmodic, terrifying irrationality, and most of the ones I know would plead guilty, anyway; but men have their own equally bizarre forms of absurd, spontaneous, and inexplicable behaviour. I refer, of course, to my not-yet-gentrified neighbours in Edmonton's north end, whose domestic melées are an endless source of late-night entertainment. Fortunately I keep the same weird hours they do. So tell me, have you ever heard a guy going on like this?

Hey, hey, come on, where ya goin'? Come on, you don't have to leave, I was just havin' a little fun. Come on, you bitch! You fucker! YOU FUCKING WHORE! Go ahead, leave, you cunt! Get the fuck out of my life! Aw... wait, just stop for a second. Come on, don't just walk away like that. You know I love you, baby. You CUNT! I know you're only leaving so you can go suck Gord's cock, you HOLE. You ugly, slimy scum trash! Hey! Hey, why are you leaving? Please come back. I promise not to do it again. Why won't you LISTEN to me? Please just stop walking away. Aw, fine, you LOUSY BITCH. I hope you fall off the curb and a car runs over your FAT ASS, you discount slut! ...Hey, I love you! I love youuuu!

When a drunk prole with a Y chromosome gets into this mode, he can do ten or eleven 180° turns inside three minutes. No doubt every man's been this confused at least once, although hopefully without the implied threat of violence that always seems to go along with it in my neighbourhood. And as surely as the men seem programmed to keep flipping the switch from virulent loathing to anguished pleading, the women seem programmed to eventually stop walking away. They never do make it as far as Gord's place.

Here's some stuff I've enjoyed lately. Mike Sugimoto talks about going under the knife as a doctor (scroll down to "That Sucked..."):

The first words out of my mouth in post-anesthetic recovery were "what was the blood loss?" The second sentence was, "What are my vitals?"

...and has great stuff on home defibrillators and hospital architecture. I really like that site. Popular fave Dave Stevens has been busy after laying low during the Report's production cycle. Kathy Shaidle has an interesting piece on the Arian heresy for Dummies. Charles Hammond has been very prolific lately and is getting more material about China on his weblog, so if that interests you, do have a look in. China's important!

Weisblott with one S and two T's has issued one of his fun pop-cult blogbursts, but if you're feeling in the mood for something more serious, check out Aaron Haspel's top five poems. They wouldn't be my own choices, but any friend of Yvor Winters is a friend of mine, and of poetry's cause.

(Link via Instapundit--you know how to get there) Extraordinary. UPI's James Bennett writes about secessionism in Western Canada and gets it almost exactly right. I think he understands us better than--well, than Eastern voters do.

There is an interesting disconnect, or discordance, which is not often commented upon by anyone (but me). Here in Alberta, there is no serious separatist movement. All the credible political and private figures who might lead one are staked to the current system. There are certain lines they won't cross for fear of ruining their ambitions in the political afterlife (the Senate, the foreign service, royal commissions and touring government panels, etc.) or the Eastern-dominated business world. Grassroots separatist parties have floundered over the presence of single-issue kooks and the difficulty of working out exactly what they want--what the bargaining position should be, what kind of separatism they wish to pursue, which provinces should be in or out of the tent, whether we should be a republic or join the Union.

Despite the lack of a serious instrument for the expression of separatist values, separatist sentiment is virtually universal amongst people born and raised in Alberta. The class of federal-government beneficiaries here is small. Most Albertans are vaguely aware that Confederation, for us, is a huge financial ripoff, with outgoing net government transfers amounting to thousands of dollars a head every year. It is a mystery to us exactly what we get for our federal taxes nowadays. Sit down and try to work it out sometime if you're an Albertan, remembering that health, welfare, and education are provincially funded and administered. What, are they spending the money on our elite, powerfully equipped armed forces?

Asked outright "Stay or go?", most Albertans (real Albertans, not people who came over from Montreal at age 16) will tell you "Go", privately. It's not just the rural loonies, either: as a rule, the more you know about trying to run a business, the more likely you are to answer "Go". I have a lot of trouble making Easterners understand this. If any well-known leader decides to step up and give a voice to Alberta separatism, they will learn. And fast.

Incidentally, yes, Alberta politicians do tend to call it "Ki-ota". I find this a bit embarrassing, but there is an old political rule governing the situation. Even Churchill, who cared very much for niceties of language, deliberately pronounced "Nazi" incorrectly ("the narzee menace") in radio broadcasts until the English people caught up to him.

I should lay off the sports--you'll get more than your fill, no doubt, as Grey Cup Week proceeds in Edmonton--but this is a special entry for Jim Henley, who says he misses watching the Canadian Football League on American TV. I bet the CFL is a lot of fun to watch if you don't care about it. If you do--well, watching your team blow a 26-point lead is a harsh education.

Anyway, I thought I'd expand, for Jim's benefit, on the Blue Bombers' second major score of the game. It was the kind of scene you don't forget, the kind the CFL supplies in overabundance.

The Bombers were down 32-6, as you'll recall, and they spent much of the third quarter moving it to 32-13, needing four downs to punch the ball in from three yards out. (The Esks made a great stand on third-and-three but a bullshit pass-interference call gave the Bombers fresh wheels.) So, the fourth quarter starts. The teams change ends.

I'm on my couch with the cat. "This is great," I'm thinking. "We're up by 19. Even in the CFL they don't blow leads like this. They must be just sick in Winnipeg. All week, all I heard was how the Winnipeg defence was unstoppable and the Eskimos were a 'troubled' team. I think this is one of the best three-hour stretches of my whole life, right here."

While I'm entertaining these thoughts, the Eskimos run a couple of plays, get nothing. Our veteran placekicker, Sean Fleming, a local boy, squares to punt. Roger Reinson, the long snapper, been around forever, fires the ball back.

Over... Fleming's... head.

"Not a problem," I'm telling myself. "Not a problem. He just has to fall on the ball. Fall on the ball, Sean. You know how to fall, don't you?"

But the bad snap has skittered back another ten yards, back to the Eskimo 20 or so. Sean Fleming is a smart man, a full-time placekicker, had several NFL tryouts where he absolutely demolished the incumbent and got released anyway. He's probably practiced this situation, what, a hundred times. And later, I was able to reconstruct his thoughts at this moment, which were:

"OK, the ball's sitting there, twenty yards behind the line of scrimmage. If I fall on the ball, that's where it's spotted, and that's where Winnipeg starts from. Whereas if I kick it through my own end zone, they get it at the existing line of scrimmage. Twenty yards further from the end zone for them.

"And I'm a kicker, right? This is my job. I can kick this ball through the end zone. It's thirty yards, a kid could do it."

Tooph! He kicks a low frozen rope, hard, in the direction of the Eskimos' end zone. The ball turns end-over-end, rotating the wrong way: it catches the grass (the real grass of Commonwealth Stadium, the league's only natural surface), bounces high. Poit, poit, poit. It's a moist day; the field is soft, muddy; everybody's jersey is caked with filth. Poit. The ball settles in the middle of the Eskimos' end zone. Its journey is over. It has by no means travelled as far as one might have wished.

And there's a moment of curious serenity here, where 35,000 fans are holding their breath and the air is still and soggy and the camera is focused on nothing but a patch of green with a little brown egg lying in the centre of the frame, as if regarded lovingly by its mother hen. And then you see the Winnipeg jerseys bursting in from camera left, looking, to my eyes, very much like Attila's Huns must have from the Seven Hills of Rome. One of the Huns falls on the ball. I hear play-by-play man Chris Cuthbert, who is a total Edmonton homer but hides it fairly well, screaming That's a touchdown! That's a touchdown! No shit it's a touchdown you cocksucker. The score is 32-19 with the extra point still to come, and my stomach begins to churn.

Yeah, we won by three points, but it's the stuff like that you remember.

(Link via Out of Lascaux) No matter what kind of government the English have, there are some things they all seem to instinctively agree upon (though I suppose this is only striking to me because I don't live in a traditional nation-state). It's amazing, isn't it, that some British government or other hasn't gotten around to giving in on the whole Elgin Marbles issue? A single memorandum would set the wheels in motion, but the Greeks have always been turned aside more or less politely, as they were earlier this week.

My own position is that objects of overwhelming cultural importance are relatively safe in that little corner of northwest Europe, safe in a way they are perhaps nowhere else in the world. Arrogant it may be, but I believe the interests of Hellenic heritage are best served by having the Marbles in England. If injured national sensitivities are the only consideration of relevance, then by all means, take the treasures of European civilization and plop them on the pointy end of the Balkan Peninsula. I believe, however, that taking the very long view--as we are obliged to when considering the fate of items dating to Classical times--this would be folly.

England has been bombed, of course, and may be bombed again, like anyplace else. I once started a study of the objets d'art destroyed in the Second World War--it's one of those things that's in my trunk, perhaps waiting to be turned into an article when I grow up. Or perhaps waiting for me to be able to tackle the subject without being driven into a frenzy of misery. I became interested after taking the standard art-history lecture on Courbet's Stone-Breakers, the object of a slightly silly 19th-century cult, but an amazing picture, a pivot point of art history. It no longer exists: it was destroyed by bombs in its native France. And yet this is merely the tip of the iceberg. The lost Van Goghs alone stagger the imagination in a way mere battle-death statistics cannot: one burnt in the flames of Yokohama, one just lost somehow in Holzdorf, one wiped out along with the rest of the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum in Berlin (whose destruction is a serious obstacle to our appreciation of Caravaggio, for one). An entire Rubens altarpiece was turned to ash in Berlin; the best oil portrait of Beethoven, by Waldmuller, destroyed when our planes blasted the offices of Brietkopf und Hartel in Leipzig; and, sickening irony, Leutze's original Washington Crossing the Delaware, that familiar set-piece of human liberty and republican values, caught in the annihilation of the city of Bremen.

The one that stings me personally is Vigée-Lebrun's painting of the Grand Duchess Anna Feodorovna. It's here, in black and white, which is the only way you can enjoy it now: like these others it was at the wrong place (the Herzogliches Museum in Gotha) at the wrong time. I would not care to defend the proposition that Elizabeth Vigée-Lebrun was a really major artist, and, as it happens, we still have her paintings coming out our ears. But at her best she was quite a recorder of the human personality, almost--almost--the equal of her contemporary Houdon. Her self-portraits have the no doubt wholly intentional effect of making you fall in love with her; and so, childishly, even disgustingly, it is the insult to her I think of when I think of the bombs falling.

I hate Canadian football. Did I mention that when I was talking about the conference final? I hate Canadian football. Hate it. I'm not going to be able to stand shit like this when I'm 40.

My many Winnipeg readers will want to skip the rest of this entry.

Great game today, through three quarters. John Avery, the 190-pound Eskimo running back with Katarina Witt's ankles, put on perhaps the greatest display of dominance I've seen in a CFL playoff game. He piled up 140-some yards rushing, which doesn't sound too too impressive until you realize he pulled a hamstring a couple minutes into the second half. He was carving up the Blue Bombers like Jack the Ripper rearranging a prossie. He put the game away single-handed. With two minutes left in the third quarter, it was 32-6 Eskies' favour. Everything was working right: the offensive line play was the best of the year, the defence had Winnipeg QB Khari Jones practically crying like a child. It was over.

Naturally, it ended 33-30--Esks' favour--and the game was in doubt until the clock ran out. (Devotees of the grotesque can consult the scoring summary.) I hate the CFL so much. Am I destined never to enjoy myself watching a football game? We won, and I still feel like vomiting.

[UPDATE, November 18: Hey, football fans! There's more fun and horrifying detail here. Viewer discretion is advised.]

The Ambler's latest observes that litigious Liberal Party heavy Warren Kinsella has confessed his authorship of Party Favours, the 1997 Canadian knock-off of Primary Colors. The author of Party Favours was identified on the spine as "Jean Doe", which, I conclude from a brief perusal of a friend's review copy, was pretty much the cleverest thing about it. Certainly I wasn't going to buy the book; with the author remaining anonymous, who knew whence one's hard-earned dollars might be destined? Why, they might even be finding their way into the pockets of Warren Kinsella.

No one cares any longer about Party Favours, but I observe that the beleaguered Chretien figure in the book was a "Franco-Albertan from Bon Accord". Well, someone's research wasn't very good: I happen to have a passing acquaintance with the place and I can tell you the name only looks French. There are Franco-Albertans galore in nearby towns like Rivière Qui Barre, Villeneuve, Legal, Morinville. The charmingly eccentric name of my hometown, however, was a coded signal given by Robert the Bruce to the townsfolk of Aberdeen in 1308, whereupon they took the local English garrison by stealth and slaughtered the lot. This is what is known as Kicking Ass in Scottish Politics. Anyway, Bon Accord was always an English town with a leavening of Germans and Ukrainians. I was speaking bad scholastic French myself long before I ever heard a real French accent on the street.

(I use the term "street" here in a very loose fashion. Here's a picture of Bon Accord circa 1984. I used to play on those grain elevators, which are long since destroyed. Look close, maybe you'll spot me! My childhood homes were about fifty yards on either side of the picture frame, give or take.)

The Mike Jenkinson review of Party Favours linked to above says "No offence to the good folks in Bon Accord, but Alberta just doesn't have that much political clout in the Liberal party." This is impossible to contradict, and yet let us take a moment to rewind to March 19, 1996, and the introduction of the newest member of the appointed Canadian Senate: Hon. Nicholas William Taylor, of Bon Accord, Alberta.

Such talent from one tiny town! A fictional Prime Minister, a real Senator, and the Crown Prince of Canadian weblogging! The memory of Sen. Taylor's induction has particular poignance just now, since he was put out to pasture last week. In Canada, at age 75, Senators are restored to their native clay, to be replaced by virile, indomitable 70-year-olds.

My short tribute to the senator "from Bon Accord" (his home is a good long drive north, actually, and I don't remember seeing him in Ducky's Tavern very often) appears in an upcoming issue of the Report. The endlessly affable Sen. Taylor is a comfortably wealthy oilman who willingly took on the worst job in the universe: leading the Alberta Liberals during the Trudeau years. (Although there are few Franco-Albertans in Bon Accord per se, the nearby ones--whose mother tongue makes them uniquely eligible for federal bilingualism largesse--helped him actually win a seat a few times.) Shoveling elephant shit in the circus would have been easier, and possibly more sanitary. But Nick was always chipper, quick with a quip, and unbelievably candid in interviews.

With him in the provincial Assembly, the Liberals always had at least one big advantage over the Conservatives: the numbers might have been against them, but they had one handsome, witty specimen of self-made manhood to stand up and rail against a wall of corpulent, sleepy feed-store gasbags. He'd have been premier by now if he'd torn up his Liberal Party card and turned his coat inside-out when Ralph Klein did. He'd have torn Ralph to bits in an intra-party fight--there'd have been nothing left. But he took a separate path, and rocky as it was, it did inevitably end in the Senate, where, just for once, Nick got to sit with the gasbags. I expect he thinks it was worth it.

And, just in case you thought you were going to get away without a mention of the Kyoto Protocol, here's an excerpt from a Friday Calgary Herald story, not on the Web, which may be of interest to Eastern readers:

A departing Alberta Liberal senator says opponents of the Kyoto accord never mention the fact that, if there is a loss of jobs in Canada from the environmental deal, it will be suffered by immigrants -- not "blue-eyed" Canadians.
Senator Nick Taylor, who reaches the mandatory retirement age of 75 on Sunday, said the rate of immigration in the country will simply have to be adjusted downward if Kyoto opponents are correct in their predictions that 300,000 to 400,000 jobs will not be created in the next 10 years because of the accord.
"Little blue-eyed Canadian boy is not going to be unemployed by Kyoto. Who may not be employed is his grandchild, or the immigration rate will have to be adapted to the jobs we are creating, as time goes on, which we do now," said the outspoken senator.

Nick further goes on to disclose that, in his opinion, the Canadian Alliance doesn't dare make the necessary connection between Kyoto and slamming the door on immigration. He doesn't say much about his fellow Liberals, who would seem to have a lot more to lose in this regard. The harsh, off-the-cuff speech I quote above is what I mean when I call Nick "candid"--but there's candour and then there's candour, you understand. The Hon. One seems to have waited until he was halfway out the door to share this little economic tidbit about Kyoto with us. In fact, he's been toeing the party line on Kyoto for some years now: proponents of the accord have often held him up as an oilman who "gets it."

Looks like he gets it all right--cover your ass, then spill the beans when you retire. Hey, I like Nick Taylor, but I didn't say he wasn't a politician.

Oh dear. Charles Tupper Jr. seems to have suffered a meltdown. He has been able to locate the e-mail I sent him about Howe vs. Gretzky, although it's been passed through an editorial mangler so that separate comments on a separate issue are interspersed with the relevant subject matter. He accuses me of racism for considering Gale Sayers a marginally more valuable football player than Jim Brown (??), compares me to Marc Herold, and describes me as a "fat-ass Fontainebleau" (does he mean the town? The chateau? Little help here?).

Is Charles deliberately trying to mimic the frenzied, wildly flailing nature of a (bad) NHL fight? One hopes so.

I'm still trying to clear out my Hotmail Inbox... apologies to those who have gotten late replies or none at all. This site now generates about five e-mails a day, so if I have to work hard for three days straight, suddenly I'm 15 or so behind. All correspondence is appreciated, whether or not it is answered. If you meant for me to laugh or learn something, I almost certainly did, because most of you have much to offer. If you meant for me to stop talking like such a scatterbrained shithead, you're possibly wasting your time--but I do like critical letters, even cruel ones.

One missive, of which I always meant to pass along the content, came from Yellowknife reader Thomas Wunderlin, who read my entry on H.R. Giger and sent this link to a series of ornamental handguns manufactured by the Swiss firm Hämmerli. The P210 "Necropolis", at lower left on that page, was designed by Giger.

"A true first-person shooter!" Mr. Wunderlin adds. I can't top that.

Drudge links to a bizarre New York Times story (registration probably required, I dunno) containing, yet again, still more shocking revelations about John F. Kennedy's health. I didn't think this kind of thing was still possible, did you? After we heard about the Addison's disease, the cortisone shots... I just cannot keep up with all the stuff that is mentioned in this article:

[N]ewly disclosed medical files covering the last eight years of Kennedy's life, including X-rays and prescription records, show that he took painkillers, antianxiety agents, stimulants and sleeping pills, as well as hormones to keep him alive, with extra doses in times of stress.

...By the time of the missile crisis, Kennedy was taking antispasmodics to control colitis; antibiotics for a urinary tract infection; and increased amounts of hydrocortisone and testosterone [!], along with salt tablets, to control his adrenal insufficiency and boost his energy.

...The records show that Kennedy variously took codeine, Demerol and methadone for pain; Ritalin, a stimulant; meprobamate and librium for anxiety; barbiturates for sleep; thyroid hormone; and injections of a blood derivative, gamma globulin, presumably to combat infections.

That's one hell of a lot of drug interactions to keep track of. I haven't even quoted the bits about chronic severe diarrhea, weeping abscesses in his spine, malaria...

The lust of American women for Kennedy men is of course legendary--it rose to the level of a running gag in Seinfeld, although I don't expect we'll be seeing those episodes rebroadcast too often in syndication. Any woman who still dreams of marrying a Kennedy should read the Times piece and realize that doing so would be the genetic equivalent of moving next to an open-pit sulfur mine. Just don't go there, girls!

You're right: I have been writing about sports too much lately. I have absolutely been writing about sports too much. Sports are not as important to my life as you would think from reading this site. I probably couldn't name a single member of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays starting rotation. I have trouble remembering if, when they put another NFL team in Cleveland, that one moved somewhere else too, later on, or if it's still there. My estimate of the number of teams in the NHL varies by about four, either way. I'm getting old: it's harder every year to tell Alex Gonzalez apart from the other Alex Gonzalez, and to remember which, if either, is still in the big leagues. Or maybe there never really were two of them at all.

Incidentally, I am always going to regard basketball as faintly ridiculous. I mean, I know intellectually it's no sillier than any of these other sports, and if it floats your boat, god bless you. I enjoyed the hell out of the NBA finals, myself, but I think it's incumbent upon a Canadian of my age to maintain a certain distance. Part respectful, part scornful.

The Canadian Football League Western Final takes place a few blocks from my house tomorrow. The CFL is composed of nine teams in two divisions. In each division--to simplify matters--when the regular season ends, the third-place team visits the second-place team's home field. On Sunday, while the first-place team looks on, idle, they play. The winner then travels to the home of the first-place team to play for the division championship the next Sunday. Usually, in the West, that game takes place here, in Edmonton.

This year, the league final, the Grey Cup, is also scheduled to happen here, next weekend. In the old days they used to switch the Grey Cup between Toronto and Vancouver every year. One year Toronto, the next Vancouver. Since the game always takes place on that icy calendrical perch overlooking the start of December, you couldn't hold it in the open-air stadiums in places like Regina or Winnipeg or Edmonton. So the conventional wisdom went, anyway. In the '80s the league went nuts and started holding Grey Cups everywhere. I think there was one in Inuvik one year. They made a conscious decision, I guess, not to care about the weather.

"Yes," they said, "it's often very cold in Edmonton in late November. Players could--let's be candid about this--die. A hypothermia-demented fullback who played his college ball at Florida State could, one of these Novembers, be heard mumbling something in the huddle and then just sort of wander off into the ice fog like Captain Oates. The next day, they find him in the parking lot in a fetal position under an abandoned F150. But since nobody in Vancouver or Toronto really cares about Canadian football--a game we have done our best to destroy with bad business decisions--let us hold the Grey Cup in places where people do care, like Regina and Winnipeg and Edmonton."

And so the Grey Cup was, casually, given to the people for the first time, freed from its endless shuttling between slightly warmer metropolises. Grey Cups on the Prairies create scenes that would give Hunter S. Thompson pause. It's the same beer-gardens-full-of-beef-and-hookers chaos as a Super Bowl weekend, I suppose, but everybody's wearing parkas: until you get within three feet you can't tell the hookers apart from the TV sound men or the ticket scalpers or the middle-aged guys who drove All The Way From Fox Creek to see the game. You could end up making a drunken pass at your own grandma if you're not careful.

Anyway, if the Eskimos win the Western Final, they'll get to play in the Grey Cup at home: an unprecedented thing, and keep in mind the team has existed since 1925. In fact, no prairie team has yet played in a Grey Cup game at home. People are talking of a "curse". I think the "curse" is that the team with the chance to host the Grey Cup goes crazy bringing in new American talent, runs the table during the season, and then craps out in the cold weather because of the new southern imports and the two-week layoff. But that's just a guess.

The Western Final has its own special mystique here in Edmonton. Because the Eskimos have never made a hometown Grey Cup, the conference final is the last game we get to see them play. The city isn't full of boozy tourists: it's mostly just us, gathering our collective will in grim Anglo-Saxon and Eastern European silence. The West is normally the stronger division by far, so often the winner of the Western Final is the strong favourite in the Grey Cup. The Eskimos are Expected, capital-E, to make it to the Western Final every year, although, alas, they are no longer much expected to win it. They've lost, what, five of the damn things in a row. Last year the Eskies got the bye and the home-field and proceeded to embarrass the city as badly as I've seen a team do, losing 34-16 and turning over the ball twelve times. Twelve turnovers. I assure you the figure is as ridiculous as it would appear in American football.

I am trying to keep my hopes for the 2002 event minimal. Our coach, Tom "Ned Flanders" Higgins (yes, that is his real nickname), was faced with a severe QB controversy all year and simply decided not to settle it. If Guy A looks weak after one quarter, Guy B trots in to call signals. Which is fine, actually--both guys are sensational, easily two of the four best QBs in the league these days. (They make a fascinating study in contrasts, Messrs. A and B do: Jason Maas is an intense skater-punk-looking kid with a Brett Favre arm and a shaved head, and Ricky Ray is an easy-going, sideburn-wearing Southerner who sells Fritos in the off-season and does a mean Elvis.) More worrisome is that the team cut one of its speed backs after the last regular-season game, leaving us with just one guy to run the ball--John Avery, a terrific open-field improviser who's been averaging two or three fumbles a game lately. Yikes. The sub-zero weather's not gonna help that. Having turked the other featured rusher because of various intolerable locker-room shenanigans (no Randy Mosses in this league, baby), Higgins--get this!--plans to start a spare offensive lineman at half for blocking purposes. It could be pure genius! I hope so. I'm sitting here wondering how it happened that my team has to try shit like this, this late in the year.

But talent-wise, our opponents--the Winnipeg Blue Bombers--don't match up. So for once I'm hoping for the weather to warm up for the game. My life is marked out in Western Finals; far more than my birthday, it is the signpost that tells me I'm another year older. So it's sort of a melancholy, reflective occasion even when the Eskimos win. Not that I really remember what that's like anymore. Goddamn, guys... please just seal the deal this one time...

Marc Weisblott (one S, two T's... one S, two T's...) has about 30,000 words of stuff over on his patch about his recent trip to L.A. and hanging out with... shit, pretty much everybody. I made a list of a dozen noteworthy American websites a few months back, and I think he met the maintainers of... what, five? Six of them? He went to Eugene Volokh's house with Luke Ford and met Mickey Kaus... that's just crazy, that shouldn't even be possible--this is a distributed international medium, right? Weisblott seems to have blundered into the Web version of one of those old Hollywood parties where Jimmy Stewart is thumbwrestling with Clark Gable and Henry Fonda is the referee.

Unfortunately, amidst the lively reportage, Weisblott pauses to tear a strip off Vice magazine. (Sorry, no permalinks. Actually, he's got page anchors in the source code, but they're empty for some reason.) Damn, what? See, I'm at a disadvantage because I started liking Vice before I paid any kind of attention and found out those guys were Canadian, so I never got the memo about how I was supposed to give them rimjobs because they were Canadian, nor the one about how I was supposed to despise them as flash-in-the-pan sellout assholes because they were Canadian (and moved south, like you would if you owned any kind of a growing business). I just like the Do's and Don'ts! They crack me up! I hope that doesn't make me a bad person.

Oh, and Brian Sterling? If you're reading this, apology accepted, bro.

[UPDATE, November 16: Weisblott--for it is he--writes to correct my fuzzy-headed impression that Luke Ford went with him to Casa Volokh after Weisblott begged off attending the Jewish Singles Event. In fact, they parted ways: Luke went to the meat market, Weisblott crashed the Volokh party. Er, attended! Attended was the verb I wanted there. Yeah. 1S2T adds that he did meet Sara Riemensnyder at the Volokh thing. I trust this will set the record of Blog History in suitable order.]

Yes, Flash is the AIDS of the Internet, but I did enjoy Strindberg & Helium. (Via Aaron Haspel.)

Sasha Castel, whose weblog has become infested with a mysterious gang of ne'er-do-wells, reports on an effort to airlift makeup to the women of Afghanistan. Orwell observed during the Second World War that the female impulse to wear makeup is so powerful--despite the universal hostility of religious fanatics to "face-painting"--that even in His Majesty's women's prisons, wayward girls were said to scrape the red dye off Royal Mail bags for cosmetic use.

Kevin Grace has Weltschmerz--in the original German! Kevin Steel reveals his poetry to the world--and some of it's actually pretty good! Jeremy Lott is backing and filling about being a nasty drunk--and has very definite ideas about how a party should be run!

I almost missed the hiring of 67-year-old Felipe Alou to run the National League champion Giants. BP's Michael Wolverton comments here.

Alou is probably the right kind of manager to run what GM Brian Sabean calls an "interesting, diverse group." (Translation: they hate each other.) In the mid-'90s, when the Expos were successful under Alou, he got the best out of young pitchers and made tactical innovations. Later in his tenure, he was phoning it in, doing things like leaving Javy Vazquez in for 130 pitches to protect a five-run lead. Arrivals like Peter Bergeron and Milton Bradley kept flatlining on his watch, and while I guess he must get credit for not destroying Vladimir Guerrero, do you see many signs of careful instruction and discipline in Vladdy's game? Not to insult Vlad--it is, in fact, a testimony to his skills--but he's a guy who succeeds despite not really knowing where the strike zone is, or how to run the bases.

Do I blame Felipe, entirely, for phoning it in after management gave up on him? Not really. Do I think there's a chance he'll pull his head out of his butt now that he's with an inst