One of my greatest pleasures as a journalist is finding stories that have been underreported in Canada for my Notebook page in the Western Standard. Two recent favourites [registration req'd] are this column busting a widespread myth about the Canadian origins of radio broadcasting and a piece about how the forgotten cruise-missile protesters of the 1980s just won an important victory long after they all cut their hair and got real jobs.

Over on the National Post's Full Comment site I've thrown in recent tidbits about a quiet sign of NATO progress in Afghanistan, the hidden connection between Bill Gates and J.K. Rowling, and a longer entry about Toyota's takeover of the world automobile market. (Favourite recent Full Comment entry not by me: Barbara Kay finds a surprising literary precedent for spree killer Cho Seung-Hui's horribly innovative strategy of blocking exits in Norris Hall.)

Be sure to watch for a new signed column from me in Friday's Post; if you enjoy my occasional forays into John Allen Paulos-meets-Malcolm Gladwell-and-they-have-a-slightly-stupider-child sci-media criticism, today's your lucky day. [UPDATE, 6:59 am: Here 'tis, free and online.]

One of my first thoughts upon the disclosure of the basic details about Cho Seung-Hui was that it seemed awfully odd for an English major to go on a rampage in a building consisting mostly of engineering classes. One of my very next thoughts was that being an English major at a university with "Tech" in the name is an awfully awkward thing to be, period. And that would seem to go double for someone who did not speak any English at all in his family home and who used the language--as you can see from reading his one-act plays or looking at his "manifesto"--exactly like an inept subtitler of Chinese B-movies.

In other words, the scattered bits of infomation about the (apparently borderline-retarded) killer practically screamed out a very likely fact about him--namely, that he had taken some poor high-school grades into the English program at Tech in the hopes of transferring into engineering, or had started in engineering, made a hash of it, and clung to his varsity eligibility (in a fashion familiar to undergraduates everywhere) by migrating into English. I hesitate to add the words "...in the hopes of pleasing his family" to either of these cases, since it borders on stereotyping to assume that Cho somehow misplaced the stock script for a second-generation participant in the American Dream. But then again, if you're looking for evidence that he faced real or imagined familial pressures, you might note that in the past few days that some of his extended-family members have described his parents as too poor to seek out the mental-health assistance they (and everyone who ever so much as laid eyes on him) knew he needed. Where, then, did the money to send him to an American university come from? I think it's safe to say he wasn't the type to win a bundle of scholarships, and if he ever held a job, no one's yet come forward describing themselves as a former boss or co-worker. (Important caveat: he might easily have earned a salary working for the business his parents owned.)

At any rate, some circumstantial evidence suggesting that Cho had hopes of qualifying as an engineer has emerged this evening, courtesy of Fox News:

Why did the English major target Norris, a building dominated by engineering and foreign language classes? Chris Davids, a Virginia Tech senior who went to high school with Cho, said he remembers seeing Cho on campus a lot freshman year, and concluded that Cho, like him, started out as an engineering major.
"If he started in engineering and had to switch to English that might be a reason why he's angry at the engineering department," Davids said.

I knew if I missed that "plurisapience" bus last Monday, there wouldn't be another one around for a while. I was busy last week dictating conventional wisdom on the Liberal-Green electoral accord (ousted Green candidate Kevin Potvin is blaming my editorial for his comeuppance), bidding farewell to Kurt Vonnegut, arguing that you should be able to sell your own damn kidney to whomever you like, and (on top of all of this) writing a gigantic piece on Jackie Robinson that will have to be either implanted in the National Post with a crane sometime this week, dismembered, or binned. I am told the former is still being attempted.

Readers suggested many alternatives to "plurisapient/plurisapience", and at least one made a manful but failed effort to smuggle it into the pages of a major metropolitan newspaper.

Another good word, which plays off misunderstanding, might be massunderstanding. But that works only as a noun; I can't see an adjective coming out of it.
Panperception and panperceptive work as n. and v., but they're not as precise as plurisapience/-ient.
My last entry would be throngtelligence and throngtelligent, but they're not as elegant as yours. -Terry O'Neill

In the spirit of "let's mash some Greek words together", how about plethosophy, from plethus for crowd and sophos for wisdom? -Michael Smit

Plethosophia? I think it’s got about the same chance of being understood as "plurisapience--and it's Greek! That may give it a leg up with the all-important Christian market. Plus, I just like the phrase "plethosophical insight." Yes, better than "plurisapient insight." [...he said, as if he or anyone could possibly pronounce "plethosophical." -ed.]
I’ve also been thinking about ways of incorporating the prefix pleb- as I think that adds the subtle hint that the crowd doesn’t have to be a crowd of experts or anything. Plurisapience could conceivably refer to something rather like peer review, could it not? [I think the notion of the "plural" applies more accurately to a summed or averaged judgment of the many than it does to a series of individual judgments, like peer review of a scholarly paper. -ed.]
So: plebignosis? It looks god awful to the eye, but it sort of rolls off the tongue. [Yes--the way a drunkard falls out of bed. -ed.] Or: plebitenent/plebitenence? I’m not sure I’ve got the spelling there, but I think plebitenent is a nice word, perhaps because it makes me think of crowds of Scottish people drinking delicious Tennants lager, and THAT is a form of plurisapience/plethosophia I can whole-heartedly endorse.
Of course, most successful neologists understand that the real money's in mixing Latin and Greek elements. So: ochlosapience? Plebisophic? -Marc Webster, OFM

Mock away: demosophy, populosagacity, throngudition. -Miles Jenkins

I love noun plurisapience, adjective plurisapient. Although I'm also fond of aggresagacity, or aggresagacious. I think "aggresagaciousness" might be a bit much however. This based on, of course the idea of the aggregate or gathering, rather than simply a pluralism and sagacity or soundness of judgement.
...I also think plurecient or plurecience might capture the idea as well. -Jordi Morgan

I propose grous, a portmanteau of group and nous. It's more concise than your offering, which is a blessing in this busy age of ours. Also, Greek trumps Latin dignitywise. -Fred Sheppard

While I'd agree a word is a good idea, so far this one isn't doing it for me. Seems like a word only William Buckley could love.
The problem is "sapience," which seems to imply intelligence or thought. I think more of quorum-sensing in tiny organisms - it's basically identical to "wisdom of crowds" but no sapience is involved. The mechanism of crowd wisdom has more in common with such cellular automata. How about "meta-mata"? Har. -Byron Fast

The weblogger Dr. Weevil offers the strongest advice when it comes to being backed up by good taste and classical education, but his preferred suggestions are the throat-clearing "ochlosophy" on the one hand and "vulgisapient" (from L. vulgus) on the other. The suffix -sophy is now totally unsuited in English to describe a process of judgment, as opposed to a body of metaphysical quackery, and the use of vulgi- suffers from a similar defect--it is too intertwined with the notion of "vulgarity." Generally all of the recommendations herein have been chosen with plenty of attention to etymological superiority and almost none to whether they can practically embed themselves in a living Germanic language. I, therefore, win. Ha!

Billy Cobham absolutely flattens an NYC audience at the rudder of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, 1973. Warning: risen Christ may not approve of clip's New Age overtones. [Reader note--"Plurisapience" update to follow in the P.M.]

James Surowiecki's concept of "the wisdom of crowds" has proven so influential, pervasive, and powerful that we are clearly in need of a single word to attach to it. It's obviously not acceptable for us to go on saying that such-and-such a decision was made on a "wisdom-of-crowds basis" or that a "wisdom-of-crowds technique" was devised to address some situation. Any minute now I expect to hear "wisdom-of-crowdsish" used as an adjective. The amazing thing is that Surowiecki missed his chance to attain true immortality by coming up with a single neologism to describe his thesis. Boob.

I've put a lot of thought into this and I'm starting the bidding with noun plurisapience, adjective plurisapient. It's unused, but it sounds convincing and dignified, and gives the new reader enough information to guess more or less what it means. (It would help if Mr. Surowiecki would adopt it. Dude, that whole "boob" thing was just a little chop-busting. Mad respect.) I send greetings and love in advance to future lexicographers who find this paragraph, and assure them that my creation is, as of this date, wholly original to the best of my knowledge. Anyone who's got a better word in mind can send it to the usual address so that it can be recorded here. And mocked mercilessly.

Recently in the Western Standard: I'm still contributing to the finest conservative magazine afloat, and if you feel up to registering for its site you can check out some of my favourite recent work there, including a column

Signed another pitcher today to occupy the 25th roster slot while Pedro is on the DL--the Bucs' Paul Maholm. I had to share these first half/second half splits from 2006 with someone:

GS W L IP   ERA BB SO BAvs OBPvs SLGvs
18 3-8 102 5.10 52 66 .317 .400  .468
12 5-2  73 4.28 29 51 .263 .343  .412

Play ball!

Mythbusters dept.: the March 22 edition of the Gauntlet, the University of Calgary's student newspaper, contains a hilarious profile of Bob Boston, a 1970s phys-ed major whose class photo on the wall of the kinesiology department is rubbed so often for good luck that the external glass needs frequent replacing. According to campus myth, the ex-beardie scored 100% on every single assignment and test he took at the U of C. But Boston proved surprisingly easy to find for investigator Amanda Hu and was quick to set the record straight. His summary of his undergraduate years? "Looking at my life back then, I should be dead."

Bonus content: catch me at NP's Full Comment this morning with a link to my latest column.

The other day I read, and suffered undisguisable jealousy at, the news that Aaron Haspel was not only in a fantasy baseball league with Geddy Lee for many years but won it six straight times. Actually the thing that really irritated me was that Aaron mentioned this only when it was too late for me to solicit fantasy advice from him. Readers may recall that 2006 was a difficult season for the Spruce Avenue Supernauts. The injuries ran the gamut from a high-ranking prospect's spring-training tussle with a sunscreen bottle to the year's two most nauseating, Theismann-esque incidents (Matsui's wrist, Nick Johnson's femur). The gods of baseball being so capricious and insolent, I can only wonder at the calibre of competition that allowed Mr. Haspel to win any league twice in a row, let alone six times.

With Opening Day around the corner, a (very) few of the readers who are still wondering why I disappeared for most of March may be interested in the details of my radical rebuilding program. The league is head-to-head, uses weekly scoring, and has 12 teams; each is allowed to protect six players each year.

On August 1, with the league's trading deadline fast approaching and the team falling ever further out of contention (it finished the season with virtually the same winning percentage as the real-world Kansas City Royals), my depth chart looked about like this:

C  Victor Martinez
1B Nick Johnson
2B Jeff Kent/Luis Castillo
3B Eric Chavez/Brandon Inge
SS Michael Young
OF Ken Griffey Jr.
   Mark Kotsay
  [Jeremy Hermida/various waiver-wire garbage]
DH Adam LaRoche
SP Brandon Webb
SP John Smoltz
SP Mike Mussina
SP A.J. Burnett
SP Matt Cain
SP Ian Snell
RP Chris Ray
RP Brad Lidge

Having all but given up on the season, I had to take a hard look at this lineup and ask myself which of these players were worth applying keeper tags to in the off-season. I had helped myself in the long run by paying high draft prices for steady players at scarce positions (Martinez and Young) but almost all the other good players seemed to fall into the "more trouble than they're worth" category. I had a potential case for keeping as many as four starting pitchers, but the mechanics of a weekly-scoring league (in which front-four starters will sometimes be benched in favour of poorer pitchers who have two rotation starts) make it inadvisable to protect even three of them in the off-season.

I took refuge in humanity's most inflexible principle of right conduct. "Buy low, sell high." Smoltz and Mussina, two old pitchers whose careers could end with any start, were earning all my short-term points. I decided to package them together as an irresistible stretch-drive acquisition and try to turn them into one ironclad '07 keeper. Ten owners greeted my overtures with audible snores and then promptly shrieked with girlish anger on August 8 when Avi Schaumburg traded me King Felix Hernandez for the pair, riding their arms to the league title. Felix looks pretty much to me like Dwight Gooden without the drug habit (knock on wood). The hidden gain from the trade is that the ten owners who were caught napping now pay a little more attention when I put offers on the table. Bitches.

The explosive move paid off somewhat in the off-season as I continued to try consolidating the keeper portion of my roster. With Johnson crippled, I had Webb, Felix, Victor, and Mike Young as plausible keeper-grade guys. After scouring the other owners' rosters, I gave away some draft value in exchange for extraneous talent, upgrading a reliever-heavy Avi in exchange for B.J. Ryan and cutting a deal with Matt Fenwick, who had somehow ended up with both Scott Rolen and Troy Glaus on the roster and was happy to unload Rolen. I was even able to patch the resulting holes in the draft a little bit by getting our resident Yankees fan to take Matsui off my hands--although in theory Godzilla should bounce back from a freak injury, you never like to see a power hitter hurt a wrist, and the stat line shows modest signs of decreasing authority at the plate. Plus, let's face it, I was kind of bitter about his injury, having counted heavily on MLB's reigning ironman to stay in the lineup and cover for Griffey.

Aside from a couple of weeks of cabin fever in which I pondered protecting Stephen Drew instead of Young (and part of me still thinks I'll regret not doing it), this gave me six keepers I could live with--

C  Victor Martinez
3B Scott Rolen
SS Michael Young
SP Brandon Webb
SP Felix Hernandez
RP B.J. Ryan

In plain English: baseball's #2 catcher, top-five guys on the left side of the infield, a Cy Young winner, the most exciting young pitcher in the world who's not currently rehabbing from Tommy John surgery, and the closer with the highest K-rate. At this point I felt like I had done all the heavy lifting I could. I wouldn't be writing about this if I didn't think I had an outside chance of making the playoffs this time. For the very nerdy, here's how my draft shook out (with overall rankings, counting the protected players as nos. 1 through 72, in parentheses):

Adam Dunn, OF (#75): My reward for finishing 10th last season, he was the third pick behind a carelessly-discarded Lance Berkman (!??!?!) and Frankie Rodriguez. Our league does take away points for strikeouts, but the walks will soak many of those up, he plays every day (that's what you said about Matsui--ed.) and in light of Ryan Howard's spring flailings he is probably the best overall bet to hit 45 homers.
Todd Helton, 1B (#94): I actually looked at taking Helton with my first pick, and was amazed he came all the way back to me at the end of the second (i.e., eighth) round. There's an awful lot of volatility built in, obviously--he's coming off a run of poor stats, he suffered a life-altering illness last year, his body type has changed, and then there's the Coors humidor to consider. He still seemed like at least as good a bet as other unprotected sluggers like Delgado, Drew, or Giambi.
Frank Thomas, DH (#99): Can you tell I was a little obsessed with offence early in the draft? Thomas seems happy in Toronto and he is repeating the light spring-training regimen that worked for him in 2006. But, no, I'm still not thrilled with having to take two Tmesis Guys in a row ("He's Frank frigging Thomas!").
Ray Durham, 2B (#123): Wait... the Giants are hitting who cleanup behind Bonds?
Dave Bush, SP (#142): Still a little early to grab a third starter, but he's a good pitcher turning 27 on an improving team.
Chris Burke, 2B/OF (#143): The unlikely beginnings of cobbling together an outfield-by-committee behind Dunn. I had intended to go slow filling in my outfield, but even the mediocre full-time starters got hoovered up so fast that no one openly questioned this pick. 2B eligibility makes him extra attractive as a backup for Durham--anybody who qualifies at 2B but plays in the outfield in real life actually has a kind of double position value in a fantasy league, because he's bound to be injured less. He's 27, and speed coupled with right-handed line-drive power facing a short fence gives him two possible ways to be good. If I never have to start the guy, I'll be thrilled. Since I dropped Nick Johnson, he also fulfills my "former Edmonton Trapper" karma requirement.
Mike Mussina, SP (#161): Look who's back! And at a discounted draft price no less.
Brian Fuentes, RP (#166): We start two RPs each week in our league, and while there are usually some dual-eligible RP/SPs available off the waiver wire, there just aren't as many of those around in 2007. I had really been hoping to get Chris Ray or Lidge back, but my ABC colleagues weren't born yesterday: I got caught off-guard by a run on closers and had to act faster than I'd anticipated.
Corey Hart, OF (#171): Burke without the multiposition eligibility but more power (he even has the celebrity namesake, and is also 27). I studied video of Burke and Hart (surely there was some Edwardian music-hall duo by that name?) and I figure one or the other is bound to bag 22-24 cheap HRs along with some steals. Probably a little soon to draft a guy who could lose his job quickly and get dumped onto the ABC waiver wire followed by a bright-blue skein of obscene imprecations.
Nomar Garciaparra, 1B/?? (#190): Sorry, but grabbing Nomar this late to cover both Helton and the Big Hurt in case of injury can only be compared emotionally to a really, really satisfying early-morning crap. Bound to draw into my starting lineup at some point, and still has the talent to hit .320. Seriously, how can twins not be a good omen??
Kevin Kouzmanoff, 3B (#195): Although at this point I just needed to keep piling up further outfielders for the committee and start looking at sleeper pitchers for roster depth, with this kid falling so low and me still not having a backup for Rolen--well, sometimes the "best player available" light just switches on. I didn't do what you'd call due diligence, but he has three things going for him: the '06 minor-league numbers are pure stat-porn, the team just traded an elite prospect to make room for him, and the pick made everybody else in my league furious. Há hà!
Dave Roberts, OF (#205): The committee welcomes aboard a World Series hero. A top-30 outfielder in our scoring system last year, and will get even more ABs hitting in the leadoff slot this year. He seems like an odd guy to think of as a "safe, reliable" #3/#4 outfielder, since he squandered his twenties in Jacksonville and Buffalo, but that's the basic idea.
Bengie Molina, C (#214): Sometimes, the "best Molina available" light switches on too. With Martinez becoming a part-time catcher and getting a break from the wear-and-tear, I wasn't too worried about drafting a fantasy backup, especially since there were some nice backstops available on the waiver wire all last year--so much so that I had a hard time trading Paul Lo Duca when I started getting into trouble (he finished up at .318) and Michael Barrett never even found his way onto anybody's roster (he hit .307).
Pedro Martinez, SP (#219): A controversial choice. Yes, half a season is a long time to burn a roster slot. And yeah, a lot of guys never come back from a torn labrum. And yes, in interviews Pedro always seems about five minutes away from going nuts and quitting to become an ostrich farmer or fruit-beer importer or something. But he was pretty effective last year--more so than the won-lost record--throwing 86-mile-an-hour fastballs in complete agony. He'll always be effective if he can stand upright and reach the plate on fewer than three bounces. And deep down you know he is eager to pitch--not just pitch, but dominate. Right? Right??
Paul Byrd, SP (#238): .500 pitcher + new splitter = sleeper pick I'm thrilled to pieces with.
Ricky Nolasco, SP/RP (#243): Frankly he's probably not worth an ashtray full of nickels (though he did have a W-L record of 41-17 in the minors), but he has a firm rotation job in Florida to start the year and is dual-eligible. The kind of phoned-in pick that the roster structure of our league necessitates, annoyingly.
Juan Uribe, SS (#262): He's lost weight, he's 27, and he's um, facing possible trial for attempted murder? If Mike Young has his usual Mike Young season, there's about a 1% chance I'll ever need Uribe. I don't know that athletes should be devalued in fantasy just because they're facing "personal problems": more often than not they just seem to react by bearing down harder in the day job. Does anybody else think we are in the middle of a longterm trend toward big-league shortstops outhitting second basemen?
Jamie Shields, SP (#267): 2007 is probably not his breakout year, or the Rays', but you have to like the peripheral stats. This year's Ian Snell. (Yes, you know you had a rough '06 when you're saying things like "this year's Ian Snell.")
Eric Byrnes, OF (#286): Probably won't hit 26 HR again, but he's not really any worse than the other members of the OF committee, and went 25/28 on the basepaths last year. He could end up as my #2 OF--I couldn't really tell you why the other owners were taking guys like Xavier Nady or David DeJesus ahead of him.
Orlando Hernandez, SP (#291): I had him on my roster for a while in '06 and I hated to bring him back, but I needed pitching depth and he's got a double-start week for an elite team in the very first scoring period of the season. He'll probably throw a three-hitter in one of the starts and get touched up for 7 ER in the other, but as long as I come out ahead I can live with him spending most of the season stashed away in my "bullpen." Earns bonus karma points for anticommunism (but the Oilers tried that this year with Petr Nedved, and how'd that work out?).
Kelly Johnson, 2B (#310): A man only PECOTA and the Braves like, and he is shifting the wrong way along the defensive spectrum. On the other hand, PECOTA and the Braves put together arguably constitute a majority against the rest of the world, and if he holds the job he'll hit leadoff. Could be late-spring trade-bait. No idea why he fell so far--he should really be somebody's no. 2 second baseman in a 12-team fantasy league, and after my experience with Kent/Castillo in '06, the pivot is the position I am happiest about being three-deep at.

I'm setting the over-under on my finish this year at 5th out of 12. The ABC is a tough league (no bass players), but now that I understand the nuances of scoring and lineup composition a little better, if I finish lower than 8th again I'll really have to reevaluate my own self-perception as an educated baseball fan. Feedback is welcome.

Our text comes from Canadian Transportation and Logistics Magazine:

Ron Carter understands the relationship between seafood and time better than most people. After all, the director of logistics at Clearwater Seafoods in Bedford, Nova Scotia oversees time-sensitive shipments of everything from lobster to clams and crabs. And with Clearwater exporting $253 million of seafood in 2005 (representing 80% of company sales), his employer obviously understands the value of logistics. Goods need to make a seamless transition from a fleet of 21 vessels, through the supply chain, and into the refrigerators found in grocery stores, restaurants and kitchens around the world.

...[Last year] border security presented a particular challenge to the company's overnight lobster shipments. Officials had suddenly banned the gel packs traditionally used to chill the seafood, after would-be terrorists were found to be designing bombs with liquids. But the Clearwater team came up with the solution...

...which you can find here. No peeking--we operate on the honour system here.

Listen, if I should happen to check out/hide out/burn out from weblogging from time to time--amazing how people react when you take a month off every five years or so--don't let that stop you from following my work in the National Post. You shouldn't have much trouble spotting traces from my purple pen amongst the unsigned editorials, and my signed column appears every Friday. Here's last week's piece, which could have been headlined "A numerate man looks at the lotto"; here's this week's, which contains the most unequivocal cash-on-the-barrel prediction that you are likely to see in any English-language newspaper this calendar year.

Here's some stuff I've read and liked but spent my sweet goddamn time sharing with you. Nyah.

Stephen Strauss had a terrific article on the CBC website about how the epidemic of repetitive-stress injury that was supposed to have swallowed our economy never happened, and how the whole business of workplace ergonomics doesn't add up to a hill of beans scientifically. One of the quarter-baked book ideas floating around in my head is a book full of healthcare-related stuff everybody knows that almost certainly isn't true and has no reproducible warrant, like "echinacea helps colds" or "stretching before exertion helps prevent injury."

I was moved by this Chinese New Year-themed pair of oral testimonies from the worst year of the Great Leap Forward. It seems any amount of suffering can be forgiven if one has a sense it is being shared.

Have you ever heard of the Republic of Ezo? Could you find it on a map?

I invite first-hand reports on how this stuff tastes.

Even I forget sometimes that Mark Steyn is an extremely, extremely outstanding literary critic.

God bless the creator of this site. What fun. The vagaries of history have left the period from 1900 to the First World War arguably more foreign to us than many earlier eras. Hey, it's not like we have any reason to be interested in a period characterized by terrorism, the hegemony of a dominant world empire, rapid change in the media environment, sensational criminal trials, adventurism and excess among a coterie of gigarich businessmen, crackpot warnings from publicity-seeking scientists, and controversies over the purity of sporting competition and the salaries of athletes.

The environmental movement will never forgive Bjorn Lomborg for being right, but as the Christian Science Monitor reported this week, his argument that adaptation to climate change may be more sensible that radical reversals in emissions levels is finding more and more advocates. I believe it's inevitable that environmentalists will gradually become more enthusiastic about Lomborgian adaptationism as they clue in that there's just as much money in it for them and a great deal more political potential; moreover, as the latest IPCC report showed, the steady improvement of climate models has a tendency to shrink the error bars in various measures of calamity and rule out exotic worst-case scenarios, making it harder every year to sell the public on rewinding the economy to the Stone Age. The next stage of the debate will be over whether adaptation should, in general, be allowed to happen at its own pace and guided locally or whether it should be an expensive planned global-governance project. Let me add that if you're in Canadian politics it makes all kind of sense to get ahead of this process, not behind. Or we could just keep on bickering over the Kyoto Protocol, whatevs. [Related reading: a National Post editorial on the new Virgin Earth Prize.]

It appears that Edmonton is going to be the setting for the next painfully predictable cycle of optimism and disappointment over a miracle cure for cancer. That's not to say I would be anything less than thrilled if my alma mater became the place where they finally got the son of a bitch licked, and the research is certainly worth funding. But the caution and skepticism of surgeryblogger Orac seem wisest: he's an ex-student of the Dr. Michelakis of the 1990's, Judah Folkman, so he's been there/done that/got the T-shirt.

The I-only-understood-60%-of-it-but-was-still-fascinated weblog entry of the month comes from the Freedom to Tinker weblog, whose authors have envisioned a highly plausible game-theoretic scenario on the future war between next-generation DVDs and format-crackers.

I recently spent a half-hour or so perusing some fascinating galleries that show northern Alberta and Saskatchewan in, literally, a different light than you're used to. NightPhotographer.com is the creation of Edmonton's Larrie Thomson.

I've always wondered just how ridiculous the planned obsolescence of publicly-funded sports facilities can get: last Saturday China provided the definitive answer when it blew up an 18-year-old 65,000-seat soccer stadium in Shenyang. In Edmonton, the public is being buttered up to contribute to the replacement of a hockey arena that's barely 30 years old; in Toronto the Rogers Centre, considered an engineering marvel when it opened in 1989, is now routinely discussed as though it were an obsolete embarrassment. Voters should be aware that whatever replaces these facilities is likely to be much less durable, not more so.

Boxcover and glamour photographer James diGiorgio operates the crack cocaine of weblogs at PrettyGirlShooter.blogspot.com. Where else are you going to find an entry that legitimately combines lingerie pictures of Tera Patrick* with a touching story about a successful son talking with his sick mother about his vocation for the first time?

*Individual entry rated PG-13; site rated NC-17

Porn on the bus? For perhaps the first time in recorded history, a Telus customer--yours truly--comes to the defence of the phone giant and soon-to-be network smut pedlar in today's Post.

I have

Thanks to everybody who wrote in to remind me I have a weblog. There's no special explanation for the two-week break, though it's true I am probably working harder right now than I have since I was an undergraduate. My recent signed columns for the Post, in case you haven't been keeping up, include one on Merck's miracle drug for cervical cancer, an attempt to correct the record about Anna Nicole Smith, and a primer on the discounting debate surrounding global warming.

If you only read one of those, you should probably make it the latter. I was hoping for more feedback than I got: the point in question is an important one that's fairly subtle, and almost certainly too difficult for any of the politicians who are promoting the Stern Review to understand. It seems to me undeniable that if you're creating an economic model and incorporating a social rate of pure time preference chosen according to an ethical first principle--i.e., according to the value you think people should place on the future--then none of the figures you arrive at have anything to do with true social costs or benefits as such. Don't you have to use some "actual" discount rate that has a basis in empirical observation to generate real figures? Stern has responded to William Nordhaus and other critics [PDF] but the response merely reiterates the argument in the original report:

The debate on discounting illustrates how important it is to understand the different ethical assumptions that drive economic modelling. ...we take the view that it is not appropriate to assume away the importance of major and irreversible impacts that will affect future generations simply because they come after us. Therefore, we use a low rate of 'pure time preference'. [Emphasis mine]

It's simply wrong, as I see it, for Stern to describe the time-preference rate his model has imposed on society as an "assumption" about the true state of affairs. He's not even making a wild guess as to the true social rate of time preference (itself an eel-slippery construct); he's simply asserting that time has a fixed inherent value. This is exactly as if someone tried to calculate the costs of climate change on the basis that snow in Edmonton, Alberta has a fixed inherent economic value of $30 per cubic-foot-day, and then batted down the immediate objections--"In what market would or could that good fetch that price?"--by saying "It is not ethically appropriate to assume away the importance of snow simply because it is in Edmonton."

Absolutely everything I knew about lupins before last week came from the Dennis Moore sketch. Now, suddenly, they're being touted as a potential key to the future of the Alberta agricultural economy! (It should be noted, however, that a different crop is touted as a potential key to the future of the Alberta agricultural economy about once every two weeks.) Can't wait to get my first look at a whole field full of 'em.

Tomorrow's news today--literally! The National Post is ramping up a new weblog,

[UPDATE: January 26: if you're showing up on Friday you'd better check out the new column here in its natural webitat. It looks like the mighty torrents of traffic from my outbound link might have done some damage to the fragile, scaffolding-festooned Full Comment page... come to think of it, I'm not sure I ever linked to last week's column on the iPhone, which you can still catch over here.]

If you read any news items about the dramatic collapse of the roof at B.C. Place Stadium (now restored to its former glory, sort of), you'll have seen some mention of NDP North-Delta MLA Guy Gentner's prophetic questioning in the Legislative Assembly. Here's the tale of the tape from last May, when Gentner received a firm assurance from sports minister Olga Ilich that the roof should last "should last up to the Olympics and beyond." Ilich told Gentner that "The guaranteed life [of the roof] was 25 years, but that doesn't mean that it's going to fall apart in the 25th year." She was, of course, quite correct: the stadium doesn't turn 24 until this summer.

I know I'm using a cliché but there's just no other way to put this: Best rabble.ca thread ever. (þ: Chu-Carroll)

The prime minister impregnated his mistress and left his wife, you say? No biggie, reply blasé Czechs
Sweden's giga-rich Wallenberg family, a house of heroes and villains, steps briefly into the public spotlight after a century of shyness
An Illinois-educated "Christian humanist of the left" takes power in Ecuador and becomes Latin America's latest national-socialist
The World Bank says remittances are now bigger sources of income for some Euro countries than foreign investment
Toyota's building a $6,000 car for the Russian market--so why can't they build me one?
HK to mainland China: bring us your tired, your poor... but as for the pregnant women, they're definitely not welcome
Zim watch: as paper money loses value, starving slaves of Mugabe desperately turn to mass illegal mining
What's life like for the hyperintelligent? Ask Finland, the country with the largest proportion of Mensa members
Jamaica's Attorney-General: we have "no intention whatever" of decriminalizing buggery
With inflation at 9%, the Bank of Botswana is having trouble keeping the lowest-denomination coins in circulation
A popular Malaysian cure for drug addiction combines Islam, saunas, and herbs in one big pot (a literal one, judging by the illustration)
Prague's 6th district will build a memorial to "a key figure in Czech history"--Ronald Reagan
Meanwhile, a Moravian cookie shaped like a human ear becomes the CR's first EU-wide appellation controllée for food exports
An anti-hazing group discovers that a Russian draftee was kicked so hard in the guts that his small intestine had to be removed

A special tip from the Oilers' Kevin Lowe: don't be afraid to use the old "it's only his second full year in the league" trick when defending a young player who's taken a step backward. Road-tested, granddad-approved!

It would be kind of useful if weblogs could get together on a single standard for the meaning of "previous" and "next" in links between pages, and better still if webloggers would just stop using those words. On any given weblog, the "next" entry or page might be the next oldest one or the next newest: as things stand right now, you're pretty much taking a 50/50 chance when you click, and if you're reading many pages within a single site, you can end up going around in frustrating circles. What would be wrong with just using "older"/"newer" or "earlier"/"later"? Tell me Jakob Nielsen has already toasted about ten thousand people to a crisp over this.

Did Stephane Dion really tell an Edmonton audience "All these workers living too fast for the easy money in the north--it’s not good for the economy"? I have an answer to this, but I'm afraid it can't be delivered until I work out exactly how to send a kick up the dirtbox with a steel-toed boot by means of TCP/IP. Then again, maybe the person I should be kicking is myself: I argued after the election that the Liberals should look seriously at Dion on the grounds of moral seriousness.

I believe, though perhaps I am wrong, that you could get 95 out of 100 Canadians to arrange the following items on a list of "things that are good for the economy" in an order different from Stephane Dion's:

The Liberal Party of Canada
The Kyoto Protocol
A French passport
Doctorates in sociology
Oil and gas workers in Northern Alberta

But the offensiveness of Dion's comment, if it has been rendered accurately, should not be allowed to distract us from what's really going on: I suspect that what actually underlies it is a bold redefinition of the concept of "the economy."

Too often this concept is narrowly understood as equating with the inferential quantitative measures we use to get a grip on it, but "the economy" is not the gross domestic product, any more than the map is the territory. Why would Dion suggest that it is not good for the economy to have a lot of people working hard in producing an export commodity at a time when it offers very high return on investment? On the narrow view of "economy" this is good by definition. The Leader of the Opposition probably means to incorporate the psychological cohesion of the country, the welfare of the worst-off in boom areas, the integrity of the non-human environment, and God knows what else into his notion of "economy." I suppose, anyhow, that this is what he would say in his defence (though even this wouldn't account for an attack on the lifestyles and work habits of several hundred thousand people singled out for abuse because they sought productive work).

But one problem is that once you endow some word freely with a purely private meaning, you can no longer claim to be engaging in language or persuasion as such. You reduce yourself to the level of a beast who is only capable of expressing approval or disapproval--purring or growling--and the habit of bestial words tends to end in beastly deeds. The other big problem is that a man who uses subjective criteria in an impulsive way to decide what is "good for the economy" is hard to trust with the management of one.

Somehow these clips, one from Season 2 of Extras (þ: TSOYA) and the other a 1976 Neil Innes performance from Rutland Weekend Television (þ: WFMU), just seem to fit together quite nicely.

Here today, tomorrow next week: I've been miserably slow in linking to my Post column from last Friday

The late Gerald Ford, probably the most outstanding athlete to occupy the American presidency, was a business acquaintance of Peter Pocklington, the owner of the '80s Edmonton Oilers, and spent time with the members of those teams on many occasions. When Ford died last month Daryl Reaugh recalled how travel problems related to Ford's golf tournament led to his last-ever start in net for the Oilers. The team would probably have won one or two fewer Stanley Cups if Esa Tikkanen had gotten himself ventilated by the Secret Service in 1986.

I hope we have finally moved beyond the unproductive phase in which Wikipedia is tested ad nauseam for accuracy against its traditional counterparts. It's done well in most of those tests, but the attention given to them is distracting. One of the really interesting things about Wikipedia is that you can turn to it--and know in advance that you can turn to it--for some kind of answer to questions that other reference books can't squeeze in. Like last week, when I found myself wondering "What's the highest unclimbed mountain?" and knew exactly where to go.

From a Jan. 6 item in the Abbotsford News:

Things at the Matsqui Institution will likely be back to normal today after a five-day lockdown was sparked by the discovery of illicit home brews, cell phones and weapons. Inmates had been confined to their cells since Jan. 1 while staff conducted a thorough search of the institution, but the sweep was expected to end Friday evening, said assistant warden Randie Scott. ...The prisoners’ home brew operations are relatively simple, involving the fermentation of a liquid with sugar and a growth medium such as yeast, according to Scott. The most recent batch of homemade alcohol was brewed with ketchup, but fruit and potatoes have also been used.

You know, I'm not some kind of sloppy liberal when it comes to prisons, but when you find prisoners doing stuff like this, I think maybe it's time to soften up a little and hand out a few Molsons on extra-special occasions. Clearly both the inmates and the staff deserve credit for keeping the place drug-free, because nobody on this planet would resort to drinking fermented ketchup if he had access to absolutely anything else that would alter his consciousness even slightly (including, I think, Listerine and Lysol).

Nintendo's operative background theory, and this sounded way more self-serving about 3 million units ago, is that the graphics-obsessed video gaming community is a shrinking, inbred niche surrounded by a much larger and more varied group of "people who like things that are fun". There are crazy reports of people's moms and grandparents spontaneously asserting Wii fandom that sound like something out of early 1980s advertising. Obviously it's too early to credit Nintendo with pulling off a Ludological Reformation as opposed to a Christmas toy fad, but to be on the safe side we should possibly stop complaining that the production on this Cobain fellow's records seems to be of curiously low fidelity.

To those of you who recognize the style of that paragraph, I hardly need to explain that Evan Kirchhoff is back with an overview of the Christmas console wars.

Can anybody supply a remotely acceptable explanation for the way Felipe Fernandez-Armesto was treated by the Atlanta police on January 6? One hopes it will be of some general interest to newspaper editors that a best-selling historian who is 56 years old (and about as physically imposing as the Taco Bell chihuahua) was challenged on an American street by an out-of-uniform cop, knocked down when he asked to see a badge, and imprisoned with felony suspects for eight hours because he jaywalked unwittingly between two adjacent hotels.

What's most impressive about The Last Waltz 30 years later is that no one in the lineup really stands out as an embarrassment. Sure, Neil Diamond looks a little out of place (especially since he looks like somebody's agent in that suit), but his credibility stands higher now than it has at any time since. Just consider: to recreate The Last Waltz in 2007, U2 would have to retire--they're the only group still relatively close to its prime that has the necessary prestige. And if U2 put on The Last Waltz, it wouldn't be Clapton and Ringo and Van Morrison up there on the stage singing Dylan songs. It'd be Robbie Williams, the Coldplay dude, and Desmond Tutu.

To cleanse your palate of that foul foretaste of the future, here's a cheerier product of the Dylan Industry: the Byrds rocking out at the Playboy mansion. It is always New Year's Eve chez Hef.

I haven't seen any of these, but all are apparently real and all are rated at least 6.0/10 by the users of the IMDB.

Merry Christmas: I Got You Herpes
I Trust You To Kill Me
Batman's Gonna Get Shot in the Face
All The French Are Whores
Eating Out 2: Sloppy Seconds
The Connecticut Poop Movie
Forgiving Dr. Mengele
Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That!
Die and Let Live
The Bread Squeezer
Severed Will of the Seppuku Warrior
I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With

SPECIAL "DID YOU EVEN TRY" CITATION:
Lucky Number Slevin
The Pursuit of Happyness

CERTIFICATE OF DISTINCTIVE MERIT:
Bicentennial Nigger

Not if, but when: in early 2003, when I first speculated here on the possibility of an American Foreign Legion, the idea was still exotic enough to attract a fair amount of attention and strike American readers as counterintuitive. Since then a few concrete plans have been put forward by military experts, the seriousness of U.S. politicians about enforcing an immigration policy and making citizenship meaningful has grown, the Iraq debacle has replaced the "two-war doctrine" with doubts about whether America can enforce its will in even one place at a time, and the general idea of recruiting noncitizens for the American armed forces has worked its way up the chain of command.

Playing devil's advocate against St. Carl: that's the business of

Speaking of which: seeing this and sundry other news items has recently given me a fantastic money-making idea--publishing a totally independent university guide ($$$!) based entirely on a system of demerit points. As I envision it, every time a public figure said or did something dumb it would be held against the institutions that educated him. For example, my own screwups--like, say, referring to Jeremy Clarkson as "Jeffrey" three or four times in an editorial about the Top Gear TV show--would be charged to the account of the University of Alberta.

There's only one problem with the concept: how do you handle it when someone bravely spills the beans on his own school? Does it all cancel out?

- 1:22 am, December 22 (link)

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Creative vampirism

If you need another reason to hate Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, or network sitcoms in general, have a look at this recent SuicideGirls interview with Dave Foley. Foley reveals that Aaron Sorkin accidentally blew up plans for another Kids in the Hall reunion tour when his SNL-roman-á-clef got shredded by the critics and he threw a dumpster full of money at Mark McKinney to make the show-within-a-show funnier.

Obviously not many of us are likely to get the benefit of the Kids' live woodshedding, but the more time they spend together, the more likely it is that they'll come up with another movie concept they all like. For the record, the oldest Kid, Scott Thompson, is now 47 years old--the exact age at which Graham Chapman died.

- 2:25 pm, December 17 (link)

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"Nobody in their right mind is for abortions." If you think you know which Canadian party leader made this inflammatory comment and others along the same lines last month, think again--and read my column in today's National Post. For more background you can check out the weblog entry by David Akin that broke the story.

- 10:31 am, December 15 (link)

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I don't know how to feel about the Edmonton Eskimos signing a player named "Stamps". This has to be kind of unprecedented, doesn't it?--the New York Yankees never had a player named Joey Dodgers or Billy Red Sox or anything like that. -3:10 pm, December 14

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Great moments in bureaucracy

B.C. conflict-of-interest commissioner Bert Oliver made his last appearance before the province's finance committee last week and did something that should secure his legend:

Oliver appeared before the... committee Monday to say his $316,000 budget is sufficient for next year, and they’ll likely hear from his successor by the time it runs out. "As long as members conduct themselves as they have done of late, and come and talk to the commissioner before deciding to take some unwise step, I can’t see any need for spending more money in this particular field," Oliver said after his committee appearance.

Oliver is perhaps overconfident in the fine ethical sensibilities of B.C. politicians, a group that is about as good at not letting you down in the end as Steve Howe. Agencies of social control, as opposed to state watchdogs, simply never say "Things are going great--the public is really cooperating with us like a charm." Still, how often are you going to see the head of a government department or office flatly state that "We have enough money to handle our core responsibility, and therefore we don't need any more"? It's an option that's not even in the playbook: he is supposed to say "We don't have enough," "It may appear as if we have enough, but our employees are so overworked they can't remember their children's names," or "Sure, we have enough, but our job should be more broadly defined, like it is in [insert Scandinavian country]." Well done, Mr. Oliver, thou good and faithful servant.

- 2:19 am, December 14 (link)

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I have a further thought on the Zune, below, that you should check out in the interest of fairness. -1:51 am, December 14

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The government we deserve: I always knew there was something I didn't trust about Niklas Lidstrom... -10:58 am, December 12

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Zomeday Zune

"I've been playing with a Zune for a couple of weeks, and I like it. I like it a lot." You knew someone was bound to take the contrarian stance on Microsoft's new music player, but did you ever expect it to be Leander Kahney in his "Cult of Mac" column for Wired News? Here's a brief summary of Kahney's take on the details:

The Zune desktop software crashed right after installation and I had to restart... the sign-in procedure was long-winded and tedious... The catalog [of the subscription service] is smaller than the iTunes Store's... The earbuds aren't much good... Battery life isn't great. The big screen sucks juice dry a lot quicker than the latest iPods... The Wi-Fi is essentially useless. There's no one around to share songs with, and I expect it to be turned off permanently...

Kahney's review is positive for pretty much one reason: he's a Mac dweeb, and the Zune actually beats the iPod on the sole criterion--design--that is relevant to Mac dweebs. He hates most everything about the performance characteristics of the device but loves its fashionable brown colour, its interface, and the "rubbery" feel of its scratch-resistant case. What's ironic is that this tells us, more clearly than any negative review could, that the Zune is for yuppies who want their technology to come in the form of slick fashion totems.

[UPDATE, December 14: A reader points out that the summary of Kahney's review is frightfully skewed--I originally had a lot more sarcasm in the entry, and having taken it out without making the cherry-picking explicit, the summary now just looks unfair. Kahney does like stuff about the Zune aside from look and feel; it's just that his praise for the design is the only bit that comes without major misgivings (and to me he seems to underplay a lot of practical problems and warning signs, almost to a risible degree, because he's so enamoured). Sorry for not being clearer.]

- 4:34 am, December 12 (link)

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I guess the obituary of an 80-year-old is always going to contain some surprises

Who knew that Amb. Jeane Kirkpatrick was, among the other achievements in a remarkable life, the maternal vessel for "the Direct Mind Incarnation of DoKhyentsé Yeshé Dorje"?

- 7:16 am, December 11 (link)

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Bonus YouTubery: Trust me--this is the next big thing in viral schtick. It's already spreading. Don't worry if you don't laugh out loud at first--give it about 90 seconds. (þ: "Tybalt") -4:42 am, December 11

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Weekend YouTubeology

From the WFMU weblog, here's some Super-8 footage of the 1970 edition of Black Sabbath performing on a flatbed truck in the middle of an early version of the Folsom Street Parade in San Francisco. The quality of the film is poor and there's no sound, but any unedited document of the unified counterculture is precious--doubly so if it chronicles the moment of its capture by high capitalism, as this one does with the almost laughable ostentatiousness of its Warner Brothers logoes. "Straight" didn't mean then what it does now, kids. (And record companies weren't just accounting fictions--they had actual brands!)

- 3:11 am, December 11 (link)

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Dave Spart lives!

Do Health Canada and Cancer Care Ontario hate tobacco? Of course they do. But when questions of cultural relativism enter the picture, it turns out there's tobacco, and then there's tobacco.

- 4:04 am, December 10 (link)

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Recently logged

Canadian sport-stat boffin Gary Cohen deserves an equestrian statue in some public square for creating The Baseball Cube. And Hockey Recap is impressive, though more as a toy than a weapon. But if hockey ever does find its "first statistical revolutionary," it is not going to be some wiseguy who dismisses plus-minus and save percentage as "worthless". The worth of plus-minus may be small, but it is not zero; all statistics, ALL, have to be embedded in a context. When you split the number apart into separate plus and minus components and convert them into rate stats, as a few webloggers are already doing by means of painfully handwritten code, the data effectively gain another dimension--"high-event" vs. "low-event." This will be the next stat revolution in hockey when the league finally realizes it already has the data--it just needs to present them to the fan. (Ideally, in some intelligible form that encourages number-crunching, as opposed to making it a bigger pain in the ass than rectal cancer.)

As for save percentage, as far as I know it has so far defied efforts to demonstrate its uselessness. Save percentages are fairly consistent for individuals from season-to-season; they peak and decline with age as one would expect; starting goalies generally have better save percentages behind the same teams than backups; and the only shot-quality analysis I have seen leaves goalies in virtually the same rank order as unadjusted save percentage. I'm convinced but not certain that it is a statistic possessing quite high validity and meaning.

- 6:53 am, December 9 (link)

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It's always new to me

Some crazed genius unearthed a perfect piece of classic TV that lives comfortably within the ten-minute YouTube limit: "Seein' Double", the sitcom-within-a-sitcom parody produced for a 1990 episode of "Newhart". Here's part one and here's part two. Oh, man-crazy Smitty, 17 years later I still bust a gut over you.

Unfortunately there is not too much Bob Newhart material on YouTube, but in case anyone's gotten confused and now remembers "Newhart" your typical anodyne fish-out-of-water sitcom, this 1988 clip should jog your memory. And here's Bob giving a brief comedy masterclass for Mad TV in 2001.

- 6:07 am, December 7 (link)

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No way out: In case you missed it, here's my column from last Friday's National Post. It's about Mark McGwire, it's free-as-in-beer to subscribers and heathens alike, and it belongs to the ever-growing "exasperatedly trying to refute idiotic things written in the Toronto Star" subgenre of my writing.

Attentive readers of the Post will have noticed the strains of an occasional Coshian guitar-lick in the unsigned editorial columns of the paper. For the past couple months I've been contributing to the work of the edtorial board, and since everybody seems more or less happy with the results, a Post subscription would make an outstanding gift for the Colby Cosh fan in your life. Don't lie, I know you've got one.

- 4:18 am, December 6 (link)

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From the world press, 12/5/06

Japan changes its election law to allow donations from leading companies like Canon and Sony that are more than 50% foreign-held
Dodging wolves and traversing deserts, Shahid Qurbanov makes hajj on foot all the way from Azerbaijan
Charles II in the Himalayas: Nepalese lawmakers are discovering that, despite their constitution, they can just go ahead and indict King Gyanendra
The most important public-relations campaign in the world? How a few lonely Pathans are desperately trying to separate the identity of their people from the Taliban and create a democratic future
Choosing up sides: Anger heats up between Ethiopia and Eritrea as the Meles regime accuses the breakaway republic of using Somalia's Islamic courts as its catspaw
Two-time world longjump champ Fiona May uses the Italian edition of "Dancing With the Stars" as the springboard to an acting career
The Sudanese still don't want UN peacekeepers, preferring to prolong the presence of the increasingly prestigious African Union
Saudi Arabia's labour minister waves about the carrot and stick in his halting efforts to "Saudize" the labour force
Road accidents in Ghana: caused by witchcraft? The Accra Mail says no
Meet Anders Jacobsen, the apprentice plumber who is fast becoming the hottest star in ski jumping
The Norwegian government pays out hush money to students and employees who died working with benzene and radioactives in an unsafe lab
"Very skimpy pyjamas, in fact": a young mother is tied up by a South African outlaw but still manages to set the cops on him

- 12:41 am, December 5 (link)

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Get out of jail free

So, uh... no one has any problem at all with Mark Tewksbury serving as compere for Paul Martin's farewell ceremonies at the federal Liberal convention? In a city whose small businesses are sitting with millions in unpaid invoices from a sports festival that Tewksbury more or less created? Nobody has any problems with the sudden crumbling of years of Tewksburian promises that the OutGames could not and would not lose money? No one's uncomfortable with the way the event successfully held a gun to the heads of the municipality and the province at the last minute and then smacked the water like Greg Louganis coming up a quarter-rotation short? Tewksbury is the star you're enlisting to help build credibility in Quebec? For a party with rather pressing trust and fiscal responsibility issues? Fun's fun, guys, but openly mocking the voters of Canada doesn't seem like such a hot idea.

- 12:49 am, December 1 (link)

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Well, obviously: want to find the only Liberal in Calgary? Just look in Edmonton. -12:47 pm, December 1

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And you, sir, are no Barry Goldwater

Over the years I've been fairly careful, I think, about refraining from declarations of the species "If X happens, the United States of America is doomed!" But I have to admit, the eternal allure of John McCain as a presidential candidate worries me sometimes. I guess I started to feel panicky when I got David Foster Wallace's latest book of nonfiction, Consider the Lobster, for Christmas last year. Wallace is probably my favourite writer under the age of 80, and his 10,000-plus-word piece of Rolling Stone reportage on McCain's 2004 campaign, reprinted in director's-cut form within Lobster, is just as technically dazzling as you would expect. But Wallace, who is basically a gently liberal, vaguely unitarian-ish guy, comes as near as damn all to saying that McCain's torture at the hands of the Viet Cong makes it impossible NOT to vote for him. Eventually Wallace takes a deep breath and towels off, but if the seductive capabilities of McCain's biography work so well on him, who else is going to be able to resist?

All of which is by way of saying I hope a lot of Americans read Matt Welch's definitive LAT editorial on the subject of McCain's political philosophy. Mixed metaphors aside (someone's been banging the drum to put boots on the ground?), it should be a reputation-maker for Welch.

- 10:42 am, November 30 (link)

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The N word

The word "nation" used to mean something like "a group of people that share a large degree of racial and cultural homogeneity, speak a common tongue, and represent a single entity for some purpose of historical or political description." Have you noticed that the opponents of the House of Commons resolution on the nationhood of les Quebecois are arguing more or less frankly that this word "nation" now pretty much means the opposite of what it did before? On their premises, it's precisely because Quebec has one dominant ethnic group that it is so very, very dangerous to flirt with calling it a nation. But they regard it as perfectly safe, if not obligatory, to call Canada a nation. The very crux of their complaint is that their right to do so is somehow threatened by the resolution. What counts is what they want the word "nation" to mean. The actual truth about what is a nation and what's not makes absolutely no difference to their argument at all.

That's how you end up with Paul Wells saying he is "saddened that the Prime Minister of Canada has managed to get this far without feeling any need to name and celebrate a Canadian nation" even though he thinks the resolution, insofar as it stated a fact, was more or less true. Wells isn't outraged over a lie; he's having feelings about someone's else feelings. It's also how you end with bizarre, brassy mountaintop blasts like Andrew Coyne's:

To assert a national will, national objectives, a national interest, in a polyethnic, multilingual, transcontinental country, means upholding a national idea, a transcendent nationalism of ideals, against the more earthly delights of ethnic and cultural tribalism.

In other words, it means bellowing your new definition of the word "nation" as loudly as you can until the actual meaning gives way under your assault. The phrase "a transcendent nationalism of ideals" refers to nothing out there in the world, any more than would talk of "a transcendent nationalism of food" or "a transcendent nationalism of traffic signals." And just as reality is that which doesn't go away when you will it to, one's nationhood is precisely that which does not disappear when one's opinions change. North Koreans and South Koreans share very few discernible ideals, but they, being Koreans, recognizably belong to the same nation in the relevant sense of the word.

Or do they? I don't know anymore what the majority of Canada's intellectuals think they mean by "nation," though they're very clear on what it doesn't mean, and they'll set themselves on fire rather than concede that a French-Canadian might belong to any nation other than, or along with, Canada. I think I understand the true source of their anger. French Canada's claims to nationhood on genetic, historical, and cultural grounds are very strong indeed--arguably stronger than China's, for instance, and much stronger than the Ukraine's. To be an English Canadian, by contrast, is to be a stranded colonist, floating untethered on the plane of human varieties. Our ties of continuity with the past were cut in the hope that the French would cooperate and drift toward us; it is indeed terrible to contemplate the betrayal of that hope and our consequent state--so terrible, in fact, that Coyne can write that "[Quebeckers] have as much or more in common with other Canadians as they do with each other" and not even recognize that he has been driven totally round the bend by horror vacui.

I have to admit, that whole "community of communities" thing is looking better every minute. (And if we promise to be on our best behaviour, can we please have "Dominion of Canada" back?)

- 2:56 am, November 28 (link)

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A chess problem

White to move and mate.

If you solved this one, congratulations: you might just be smarter than the reigning world chess champion. (þ: Apronus.com)

- 8:30 pm, November 27 (link)

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Ancient astronauts in Alberta predicted the rise of the iPod!!! View the shocking proof here. -12:13 pm, November 24

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All the world's a stage

Sean McArdle, property master of the New York Shakespeare Festival, tells the story of the ultimate prop juste.

- 4:44 pm, November 21 (link)

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It's Morneau in America: as of today, the reigning MVPs of the NHL, NBA, and AL are all Canadian. -4:43 pm, November 21

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Blow, break, burn: in today's National Post I have a column about the suddenly bleak future of Canadian wind-farm expansion. It's perhaps also worth a read by foreigners who are interested in energy issues, and as a bonus it's on the free side of the subscriber wall.

- 6:55 am, November 21 (link)

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Overdue quiz answer

Nul points to the readers on this one, though Steven Jens was on the right track with a half-assed guess. On p. 534 of his Stalin book Sebag-Montefiore mentions a 1945 incident:

One evening, Beria suggested that they do some shooting in the garden. There were quails in a cage. "If we don't shoot them," said Beria, "the guards will eat them!" The leader, who was probably already drunk, staggered out and called for guns. Stalin, old, weak, and tipsy, not to mention his frail left arm, first felt "giddy" and fired his gun at the ground, only just missing Mikoyan. He then fired it in the air and managed to pepper his bodyguards, Colonels Tukov and Khrustalev, with shot. Afterwards Stalin apologized to them but blamed Beria.

Fowling weapons in the hands of great historical figures have done an extraordinary amount of mischief. As SSM observes in a footnote, Napoleon is thought to have shot out one of Marshal André Masséna's eyes on a hunting expedition; he too seems to have tried to fob the blame off onto someone else. His nemesis Wellington, perhaps made irresponsible by a military career that saw him continually reconnoitring in the front without ever receiving more than a scratch, was a perpetual danger; he must have blasted hide off more servants, friends, and mistresses than one could count with two hands. Queen Victoria's son Arthur, Duke of Connaught (Governor-General of Canada, 1911-16), was named for Wellington and inherited his unhappy track record; in 1891 he shot his brother-in-law Christian of Schleswig-Holstein in the face, blinding him in one eye and damaging the other.

- 5:43 am, November 21 (link)

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He's forgotten more than you'll ever know about human rights!

For those who've been wondering exactly what went wrong with Michael Ignatieff's Liberal leadership campaign, I can now provide the terrifying answer: the party obviously brought home the wrong Michael Ignatieff. The guy the Liberals wanted was the stylish, erudite human rights expert from Harvard University. But the Ignatieff now in all the papers is apparently some totally different guy who's been farming for the past few decades:

One of the things I've given emphasis to throughout the campaign, and, I think, more than any other candidate, is on the need for the Liberal Party of Canada to reach out to rural Canada, to farming Canada. I've proposed a national food strategy that would link consumers, producers, distributors and processors so that rural Canada and regional Canada feels that the Liberal Party cares about them and is engaged with them. That's one thing that I would put a lot of emphasis on.

But how do we know for sure that this agricultural wizard is a false Misha in mufti? Easy--because when The Hill Times asked him a childishly simple yes/no question about international human-rights law, he couldn't handle it.

I want to ask a few questions on human rights, because of your expertise in this area. Some American human rights organizations are pursuing in Germany a legal investigation of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for potential war crimes and human rights abuses in the Iraq war, Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo Bay. Do think it is appropriate that he is tried for war crimes?
I think it's for those organizations to take those decisions. It's not for me to comment on that one way or the other.

If it is not for the founding director of the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy to comment on such a question, for whom in the entire world could it possibly be? No, sorry--it's simply not conceivable that the real Ignatieff, who has stood so firmly for intellectual courage and unambiguous language, would have ducked this one in such a cheap, cheesy manner.

- 8:01 am, November 20 (link)

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27 hours and counting?!?! My readers more usually tackle a bleg, query, or brainteaser within 27 minutes. If no one can get this one by Sunday afternoon I'm revealing the answer and declaring myself the winner... -6:34 am, November 18

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How you can tell your father was a great man

In a comment thread full of condolences, economist David Friedman, son of the late Milton, refers to a poignant anecdote. The story goes that once, as a young academic, he found himself in need of a statistical test that could be used to evaluate columns of data for mutual consistency. To his complete surprise, the tool he needed proved to be called "the Friedman test." On further investigation it proved to have been devised in 1937 by his own father.

Most thinkers, even ones of near-genius, would consider one such eponym to be the crowning glory of a life's achievement. Whenever that man showed up for work in the morning, people would induce awe in their friends by saying "See that guy over there? That's Friedman, as in Friedman's test." But for Milton Friedman it was a nugatory footnote.

It's also little remembered--outside of the Austrian-school circles that have occasionally used the knowledge to heckle their monetarist Trotsky--that Friedman had an essential role in developing income-tax withholding as a "temporary measure" for the U.S. government during the Second World War. Needless to say, he regretted it; it made him partly responsible for the growth of the leviathan he battled for the rest of his life. But it goes to show how impressive a man usually thought of as a public polemicist really was as a pure generator of ideas. Everyone who earns, saves, or spends a dollar without worrying that it's going to disappear six months from now owes Friedman a permanent, unrecoverable, bottomless debt of gratitude.

- 4:03 am, November 17 (link)

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Since I've been stealing time from this weblog lately and putting it into books, here's a trivia question taken from one of them--Simon Sebag-Montefiore's Stalin: At The Court of the Red Tsar (a fascinating account of private life amongst the post-Bolshevik elite that suffers only from continuing lack of access to the Soviet archives that briefly opened at the start of the Yeltsin years). A no-prize goes to the first reader to write and tell me what biographical oddity Stalin shares with U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney. Use your head start well, Eastern time zone! -3:40 am, November 17

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Seriously

Can anyone tell me why canned chili is always so disappointing? In theory, it's the greatest idea since calculus: I love chili just as much as I love not having to wash a frying pan and a soup pot at the end of a meal. So about once a year I forget previous bad experiences and buy the stuff, generally in order to use it with buns, toast, or tortillas. It always ends up with me feeling as though I'd just consumed a helping of moist, timidly spiced cardboard. Adding my own flavourings does not improve matters, any more than sprinkling garlic salt or chopped jalapenos on cardboard would make it significantly more pleasant to the palate. I understand that canned foods are rarely convincing imitations of homemade items, but a tin of Campbell's soup or radioactive-orange Chef Boy-ar-dee pasta will at least fill you up and get you through the afternoon. It is, recognizably, food, even if it does contain enough sodium to create a hazard of spontaneous combustion. Canned chili, by contrast, actively resists being coverted to energy by the body. The gastrointestinal tract seems to ask "Are you quite sure we haven't processed this meal once already?"

- 9:52 am, November 16 (link)

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Dick Duff.

There: now you have a simple two-word phrase that can be used to silence anyone who doesn't think the Toronto sports media is a little self-absorbed. I'm sure Mr. Duff is a wonderful gentleman, but to induct him into the Hockey Hall of Fame is to tempt catastrophic divine recrimination. Is there literally anybody left to enshrine from amongst the '60s cereal-box heroes of our old-fart Scarberian sportswriters and the teammates of present-day executives? The Hall is already too large by a factor of three or four, not understating the matter at all, when it comes to the Original Six years. But while the rest of us agonize over whether Dino Ciccarelli or Butch Goring might be qualified enough, the voters are busy welcoming Dick Duff into the pantheon of immortality. Cognitive dissonance? The hell you say.

In case it's not clear how ridiculous things have gotten, have a look at a typical Maple Leafs roster from the JFK-Beatles era. Quite the high-powered lineup, no? With Duff, that team featured 11 future Hall of Famers and counting. The 1927 Yankees don't have this degree of representation in the Baseball Hall of Fame--yet somehow that group of Buds conspired to finish fourth in a six-team league and expire in the first round of the playoffs. And yet, believe it or not, the big Hall issue surrounding the team is "Hey, how come they haven't put Carl Brewer in the Hall yet?"

Six months after that injustice is rectified, the first "You know, Bob Baun did score the most famous goal in hockey history..." column is scheduled to hit the press, and at that point Eddie Shack might as well get his funeral suit out of mothballs.

- 7:37 am, November 14 (link)

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From the world press, 11/9/06

An Indonesian goes on trial for beheading three Christian schoolgirls as an end-of-Ramadan "gift to Muslims"
Doh dept.: what's going to happen when Kurdish regional and Iraqi national oil laws collide?
Zidane shows up in Bangladesh to help new Nobelist Yunus and France's Danone open a factory that will make yogurt for poor kids
Concerns about Arab terrorism and ultra-Orthodox counterdemonstrations drive Jerusalem's gay-pride parade off of the streets and into a more easily policed stadium setting
Rome in Sweden? An archeological dig near Gothenburg surprises by yielding Latinate ceramics
Swedish astronaut Christer Fuglesang will take elk jerky to the ISS
"Happy slapping" might have started as a media hoax, but in Denmark it has become a brutal reality
Yushchenko wants to ban foreign films that aren't translated into Ukrainian
Say it ain't so: Borat gets banned in Russia
Final total cost to world financial markets of the '01 Argentine default: $140B
Democrat victory in the US is bad news for Russia's accession to the WTO
Lynch law spreads in the Mozambican capital as the cops lose legitimacy
Markus Wolf, East Germany's elusive, legendary spymaster, dies at 83
Here's your guide to Kekri, the Finnish pastoral Halloween

- 11:30 am, November 9 (link)

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Welcome to Anglistan

You may have noticed that the blockbusting success of the Borat movie has led to an outburst of cultural learnings about the real Kazakhstan; the Central Asian crazyocracy has now found so many defenders willing to testify to its status as a counterintuitively urbane multicultural paradise that Sasha Baron-Cohen is surely eligible for a key to the city of Astana by now. (It so happens that Kazakhstan is a fairly common destination for Alberta oilpatch liaisons, making this one place in North America where the former Soviet republic wasn't really a suitable tabula rasa for SBC's satire.) Steve Sailer, for one, has joined in the fun:

The coolest thing about real Kazakhs: while lots of people hunt with falcons, Kazakhs also hunt with huge golden eagles.

Funnily enough, there is another little-known cultural backwater where hunting with golden eagles has suddenly become popular. It seems that when Tony Blair's Labour government banned fox hunting, they left the tiniest little loophole open, as Stephen Moss rose early to report for the Guardian...

There it is in the first line of the act: "A person commits an offence if he hunts a wild mammal with a dog." Couldn't be clearer. Except there are a further five words in that sentence: "... unless his hunting is exempt." Those five words--and the list of exemptions in schedule one of the act--have been the salvation of hunting. One exemption in particular has been manna to the hunters: "Flushing a wild mammal from cover is exempt hunting if undertaken for the purpose of enabling a bird of prey to hunt the wild mammal." And so hunts have begun using packs of hounds in combination with birds of prey.

Today the Cottesmore is out with its golden eagle, Anna (they did think about calling it Notil, as in Notil-eagle, but pulled back). It is perched on the arm of its handler, Vernon Moore, and is the most important participant in the day's hunting. Without the bird of prey, it would not be legal to flush out a fox using a pack of hounds. All that would be permissible would be the use of a pair of hounds to flush out a fox to be shot. Some hunts are using the latter exemption, but it is the presence of a bird of prey that permits the hounds to work as a pack of 30 or 40--the essence of hunting, in the view of connoisseurs.

"The exemptions in the act allow us to do an awful lot," admits Mayo, "and the mood is much more optimistic now than it was. For so long we had the ban hanging over us, and then the worst that could ever happen happened. Now we're over that huge hump. We've survived two seasons, and for the first time in years there is a real prospect of my grandchildren being able to hunt. Meltdown didn't happen."

The Cottesmore has a great deal to thank Anna for, yet the eagle has only ever killed one fox. Hunting a fox with a bird of prey is bloody hard, especially in the presence of a pack of 40 hounds, 70 people on horseback and large numbers of car and foot followers. If the hounds and the bird get to the fox simultaneously, mayhem is likely to ensue; or the bird might mistake a small dog for the fox and carry off Miss Ponsonby-Smythe's Jack Russell; or a bird of prey of lesser stature than a golden eagle might get mauled by a fox.

- 4:03 am, November 6 (link)

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RECENTLY TRUNCATED:
· The rise of the meta-nerd
· As the cars get expensive, the parts get cheaper
· An economist's view of God
· The death of the five-goal game
· Bertuzzi's back gives out in a new town
· Burying the Edmonton Eskimos' season
· Photos from the inaugural BoA/CiO street-hockey classic
· This Community Tolerates Prostitution
· Judge Dredd, the lost episodes
· The Oilers' new Norwegian
· YouTube: the athlete's worst nightmare
· I tell you three times--update your drivers
· An evening with Chester Brown
· Ms. tries (not hard enough) to mainstream abortion
· Swimmer's ear for a non-swimmer
· The Globe goes to the "University of Edmonton"
· Reviewing the new super-Coke
· Two views of a concert
· R.I.P., Kokudo Bunnies
· Hamsterballs: Top Gear's co-host runs off the track
· The smith and the wolf
· At last, unification for the chess championship
· YouTube: classic SCTV sketches
· Does the owner of the Isles kiss cows?
· Hooray for the Blank decision
· The exterior inner lives of Americans
· Liberal nastygrams vs. freedom of satire
· YouTube: the Who plays a neglected classic
· Reuters mangles some aerodynamics
· All out of energy: enviro-propaganda from the '70s
· The tall-famous-people quiz [Answer here]
· Liquids on an airplane: the last word
· Beware of the BUKAKE-mobile
· Fidel as Superman: Sasha Trudeau's obnoxious Star column
· Liquids on an airplane: where's the credible threat model?
· The NYT messes up a health story
· A look back at an MLB fantasy season
· The real source of the new Sabres logo
· From "degenerate artist" to Hitler's sculptor
· A child's guide to magazine detection
· The shame of St. Albert
· Hmm, funny how Castro got sick the second they found oil off Cuba's coast
· The hidden first act of a death-penalty reformer's life
· Pakistan's last Christian cricketer
· It wasn't a headbutt, it was a cabezazo
· Zidane as herald of Muslim rage?
· From red paper clip to Kipling, Sask.
· Stephen Harper: the new JFK? Really??
· The Canadian Alliance didn't die, it just went to Mexico
· The "other" Montreal
· Investigating the Roloson trade
· YouTube bytes '71: Can, Vanishing Point, Billy Preston

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