Straight Faces

"These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don't smile baby, don't smile
Don't smile"

I got my driver's license photo updated today. I think that if I was writing a book about the current era, I'd title it, "Don't Smile."

But then, I've always had a bit of a glass half empty outlook on things...

Pundit Stupidity Syndrome

Margaret Wente (I know, I know) had a column the other day about how the only blogs that exist are political blogs, and only men have blogs and men blog because they suffer from a gender wide syndrome known as male answer syndrome, concluding, "blogging? ... that's guy stuff. And they are welcome to it."

The article was far too inane to take offense but it seemed a worthy target of mockery, so in that spirit, I offer the following Wente-centric history of blogging:

1997: The word 'blog' is coined
1999: Blogger is launched
2005: Over 10,000,000 blogs in existence
2007: Over 100,000,000 blogs in existence
2010: Margaret Wente discovers that blogs exist
TBD: Margaret Wente discovers that not all blogs are about politics
TBD: Margaret Wente discovers that there are millions of female bloggers out there
TBD: Margaret Wente realizes that she has spent the last decade (or more) of her life as a paid female blogger who suffers from an acute case of male answer syndrome.

Worst Marketing Ever...

I don't know how long this link will last, but I picked this real estate listing up from Vancouver Condo Info (in turn, via Garth Turner's 'Greater Fool' blog), and as a commenter says at VCI, one can only imagine why the realtors saw fit to provide slo-mo zoom-ins on every last abscess of this 'house' rather than simply providing an exterior shot and noting 'land only' or 'teardown' - but of course, what can you expect for a measly $580k...

Progress

I see that Bank of Montreal just completed spending a pile of money to renovate their Vancouver Main branch, moving the teller lines from the basement to the main floor. Meanwhile, two blocks away, HSBC is spending a pile of money to move the tellers from the main floor to the basement...

Libertarian Magic Dust

I only post this video because just the other day I was reading (via this very interesting post from Dani Rodrik) a Libertarian argument that the case of Somalia shows the virtues of anarchy/Libertarianism in action...

The Name of the Game is Right There on the Box

Before I take on the bleak prospect of considering the outlook for 2009, first a quote from perhaps the last person in the world you would want to play monopoly with,

Benjamin Powell, of the Von Mises Institute, writes, "What's Wrong with Monopoly (the game)?"

"The pervasiveness of monopolies in the game does not represent the situation in the real world. Every piece of property on the game board is essentially a monopoly; once the dice roll determines where a player lands, there is only one seller who the consumer must purchase from. The monopolies are easily obtained by purchasing land from the bank or another player. In the real world, however, consumers are rarely compelled to purchase goods from a seller—or if one seller exists it is because it has out-competed others over time. Even with one seller, consumers can always switch to substitutes or abstain from purchasing completely. That is not the case in Monopoly. Again, this is not a small matter. The game is wrong on the central point of economic decision making: who is in control of what is produced and how?"

I think any further comment on my part would be superfluous.

Sword of Damocles

Alan, from Gen X at 40, talks a bit about blogging today, but the part that alarmed me was his conclusion:

"And isn't it significant that there has not been a really bad movie - not a movie at all in fact - about blogging like email's 1998 You've Got Mail or that 1983 video game based classic WarGames?"

Now that Alan has brought it up, I suspect that it is almost inevitable that, at some point, a movie will be made about blogging. Now if it was just a film adaptation of Ender's Game, I could live with (even welcome) that, but I'm guessing it's going to be far more painful.

Some potential ideas:

Romantic Comedy

'You've Got Comments' - A winsome urban girl with a funky blog about problems with the local telecommunications company falls in love with a guy who leaves lots of witty comments on her site. It turns out that he is a telecom exec who is in charge of the lobby group which eventually gets all ISP's to block access to her site. She shuts down her blog, goes off to live with the telecom guy and they all live happily ever after.

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Political Thriller

'The Blog Identity' - The President of the United States, a handsome, likeable man, swept to power on a progressive anti-corruption platform. But since taking office he has led the country into a military quagmire based on a pack of lies and deception, severely damaged the reputation of the once great U.S. of A. around the world, created a huge financial mess domestically, run rampant over the poor and the environment, appointed partisan corporate hacks to key positions of responsibility and generally been a huge disappointment. But, thanks to his political party's control of a submissive media, the public remains apathetic or even endorses his dangerous regime.

Then a new blog suddenly appears which seems to have access to insider information at the highest levels. The new blog begins fingering people around the President (the sell-out Vice President, the arrogant Secretary of Defense, the smear-tactic specialist political advisor). The media tries to ignore the new information but, despite their efforts, a feisty, ambitious, young (and beautiful) prosecutor is appointed to head a grand jury and start investigating the corruption. As the people surrounding the president start to get subpoenaed and one even goes to jail, they desperately hunt to find out who is running this new blog and where it is getting all its inside information.

The prosecutor gets closer and closer to her ultimate goal of bringing down the president himself, even as she finds herself falling in love with him (the president's wife died 2 years earlier) and wondering how he can go along with such terrible policies. Finally, we find out the truth, the blog is being run by the President's (incorrigible) 12 year old son. It turns out that, after his wife died, the president was so depressed that he allowed himself to be used as a figurehead to front for a corrupt cabal who only wanted power to serve their own selfish needs.

Once he saw the damage the policies were doing, the president wanted to change course, but he was in too deep and his cronies threatened damage to him and his family if he stopped following orders or said anything to anyone. With no other options, the President began confiding damaging secrets to his son, the only person he could communicate with without being eavesdropped on, and his son ran the anonymous blog.

In the end, the cronies are all thrown in jail, the president resigns in a tearful press conference to make way for the one honest member of his administration and he goes off to the ranch to live happily ever after with the prosecutor.

Because there can never be too many movies about the American president.

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Canadian / Foreign - rural:

'Margeret's Musings' - A bright teenage girl is frustrated by the dead-end resource-based little town she lives in, the stupid mistakes the people make in their lives there and the fact she is not likely to ever escape to the big city and pursue her dream of becoming a writer.

In frustration she starts an anonymous blog which begins revealing some of the town's silly secrets and offering thinly veiled advice to town members. The people are upset about this nosy blog upsetting people's lives but, at the same time, once the secrets come out and people start taking the blog's advice, the town's old quarrels start to get resolved, people being to solve some of their personal problems and the people who are 'meant' to be together start to move towards ending up together.

Buoyed by success, the blog writer tries to use her blog to lure a handsome, sophisticated new stranger in town (from the big city) to fall in love with her, but foolishly resorts to the same silly deception and secret-keeping that she derided in others. All her efforts backfire and she ends up turning the handsome stranger against her, seemingly for good, as he decides to leave town. At the same time, her secret is exposed and she feels the wrath of her fellow townspeople.

The blogger confronts the handsome boy before he can leave town and tells him the truth and he confesses that he was secretly in love with her too. Not only that but his mother works as an editor for one of the big Toronto newspapers and he had told her to read the blog. Based on the quality of the writing in the blog, the editor wants the blogger to come to Toronto for an internship. Nothing big, but possibly the start of a promising career, and of course the handsome boy lives in Toronto too (and the townspeople realize how much she has helped them and forgive her).

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Canadian / Foreign - urban (not rated):

'Sallow' - A number of strange characters who all happen to live in the same neighbourhood each run their own blogs. A seemingly happily married middle aged family man runs a blog about the local gay sex scene. A disaffected teenage boy writes a blog about sailing. A mysterious teenage girl runs a photoblog of pictures taken in and around the neighbourhood. A young couple blogs about their home renovations. A woman runs a blog which covertly passes on key times and dates for people running a human smuggling ring which tries to bring in refugees from failed states abroad.

The various characters have some random encounters which don't lead anywhere. There is gay sex. Many melancholy looks are exchanged. The blogs are only tangentially related to the story. In the end, nothing much really happens, but the disaffected teenager leaves town to head for the sea.

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Your turn - what would the plot be if you were making a movie about blogging? Or, if Hollywood was making a movie about blogging what would you expect / hope for?

It's the Same Old Tune?

There seems to be quite the media blitz going on for the movie version of 'The Dukes of Hazzard'. With it's release, I guess Jessica Simpson will then have to be considered a music star, a TV star, and a movie star.

Maybe it's snobbish to suggest that different routes to becoming successful have a different moral value and some are thus better than others, or that some people are more deserving of fame and recognition than others, but, looking at Simpson's body of work, I think it's fair to say that I don't think Waylon done it that way.

At the Video Store

I wonder if Canada is the only country where domestic movies either get put in their own section or get lumped in with 'foreign'. And to find them, you generally need to look in a back, dark corner of the store, often adjacent to the porn section.

Not that I'm disparaging this filing system - if anything it seems quite an accurate assessment of Canadian film. Still, I'm just wondering if this happens in other countries like the U.K., Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, France etc.


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On the topic of Canadian movies, I'm not going to write a review, but I thought that 'Seducing Dr. Lewis', a Québécois movie about a small (former) fishing village which goes to great lengths to try and get a doctor to come there, was pretty good. Some may find the premise a bit implausible, but not those who come from my hometown of Peterborough. That is because, while, of course, it pales in comparison with the mighty lift lock, there is a modest tourist attraction in Peterborough known as the Hutchison house.

One of the oldest houses in the city, it was built in 1836 as an enticement for the local doctor (Dr. Hutchison). Of course, back in those days, heading into the boonies to be a doctor involved more than just putting up with bad cellphone service and Dr. Hutchison died of typhus in 1847 while attending to stricken immigrants.

Getting Back to Basic

Greg over at Sinister Thoughts made me laugh with this post, which helps explain why federal politics seems to be stuck in an endless loop these days.

Someone really needs to move the punditocracy's cheese.

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¹ Important: Go read Greg's post before reading this footnote.









So you see, that wasn't a typo in my title after all, it was just a clever pun on the programming language called 'Basic'. What do we learn from this? Any time you see what looks to be type-o, misspelling or improper punctuation on this sight; you should just assume that it is something clever, even if you're not clever enough to see how it is so clever.

No Laughing Matter

So I was in the store buying a birthday card just recently, unconsciously ignoring the 30% or so of all birthday cards which contain age jokes, when the part of my brain which I generally try to keep quiet roused itself and wondered, 'who buys all these age joke birthday cards anyway?¹'.

Now I appreciate that there are times when you feel you should get a card but you also feel like you need some humour to keep an appropriate emotional distance, and I also appreciate that birthday card writers don't have much to go on other than the fact that someone is obviously having a birthday, which is a marker for tracking age, but still: Surely the volume of age joke related cards on the shelves is way out of proportion to the number of people who walk into a card store thinking, 'I know, I'll get a card that makes a joke about so and so getting old, it will be witty and I'm sure they'll appreciate it - plus it's so original!'?

I mean, even if the age-joke card had a trendy run once where they were avant-garde or fresh or whatever, surely by now the level of desire people have to receive/give age joke cards must have fallen well below 30% of all birthday cards - or maybe I'm just out of touch. Maybe people like age jokes more than I think. Maybe the alternatives are just so limited that age jokes are the best bet. Or maybe age jokes are just the kind of humour that never gets old.


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¹ And for those of you thinking, 'Just give it a few years buddy and you'll find out first hand who buys those age joke cards', I say a) ha ha and b) I'm not so sure; Even as I get old, I don't expect to receive many age joke cards from either friends or family. Therein lies the mystery. Either the greeting card companies are suffering a severe failure of market understanding or (more likely) some poor saps get huge numbers of these cards.


Afterthought: I wonder how much analysis greeting card companies do to determine what cards to put on the shelves. I assume they track each card individually, but what about categories of cards? Are there big bar graphs in some corner office somewhere showing the steady march of age-jokes to occupy a full third of the birthday card pie-chart? What are the sales trends of sympathetic vs. mocking cards over the last few decades I wonder. Are we getting more sarcastic/critical/honest as a society over time?


After-Afterthought: It may not be a total fluke that I ended up in a job analyzing data for a living.

There Has to be a Logical Explanation...

for this.

It's not that Stronach would be a bad fit with the Liberal party, but, notwithstanding the offer of a cabinet position, the timing of the move just seems really strange and poor (from her perspective). Maybe I underestimate the level of tolerance in political circles for people who switch parties or maybe I underestimate the fatigue of voters with the Liberal party, but it doesn't seem like a smart move to me.

Applying one part random guesswork, two parts vague memories of the movie 'Trading Spaces' and 0 parts Occam's Razor here is what I think is really going on.

---

Cut to three years ago, the scene is a windswept turret in a fairytale castle nestled somewhere in the Austrian alps. A father and daughter are having breakfast.

DAUGHTER: "You know what, I'm tired of business, I think I'll become a cabinet minister"

FATHER: "Just like that?"

DAUGHTER: "Sure, I'm rich, attractive and moderate - how hard can it be?"

FATHER: "Well, it *would* make lobbying the government even easier than it is now, but you've never been involved in anything remotely related to politics - it's not as easy as it looks, you know"

DAUGHTER: "I don't have to be good, I just have to have connections."

FATHER: "Point taken. But still, it will take time, do you really want to devote ten or more years of your life to such a thankless task?"

DAUGHTER: "I'm pretty sure I can be a Cabinet Minister in three years"

FATHER: "No Way"

DAUGHTER: "Way!"

FATHER: "Wanna Bet?"

DAUGHTER: "You're on. $5 million to the winner"

FATHER: "Sounds good - just do me one favour, run for the Conservatives all right? This castle has some serious upkeep, so the more business friendly the government we have in power, the better.

DAUGHTER (smiling): "We'll see".

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Hey, it could have happened that way...

Update: On second thought, the scene I described is pretty implausible. There's no way Frank would have minded Belinda joining the Liberals from the very beginning.

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Note: There's lots more (serious) commentary all around the wonderful world of Canadian blogs: For example, Andrew and Timmy both have some commentary and roundup.

Empathy Gone Wild

So they changed the locks at my apartment building. But I still have my old key. Left with no purpose in life, a key without a keyhole, the same key it always was, but forever doomed to irrelevance; I sympathize and find it hard to just throw it away. But of course, as my girlfriend helpfully pointed out when I raised this dilemma, 'It's just a lump of metal'.

The New Spell Checking

So I was checking the referring url's to my site (i.e. the last page people were at before they came here) and I noticed a bunch of google searches for 'Jetsgo' which surprised me because my site doesn't rank too high on a search for 'Jetsgo'. I followed the link to the referring sites and realized that it was in fact a search for 'Jestgo' which was leading people to my site (I'm #2 on that one).

Apparently when I first posted about Jetsgo back in December, I misspelled it as 'Jestgo' and I'm not the only one who is prone to that mistake. I'm guessing that this isn't what people mean when they talk about the 'self-correcting blogosphere'.

At any rate, I'm always looking for ways to build traffic so perhaps this could be a workable strategy. Keep an eye out for lots of mentions of Bombradier, Notrel and Air Canaad in the near future.

A Short Walk in the Mud

I have to admit I was a bit puzzled by Conservative Party leader Stephen Harper's reaction to the budget last week, and I thought that Warren Kinsella was rightly critical of his performance (in his feb 24 post). More generally, ever since the last election, I haven't really gotten the feeling that Harper's heart is really in the battle to form the next government.

Despite widespread fatigue with Liberal government, the ongoing sponsorship scandal, the humourous yet disturbing mismanagement of the Missile Defence file, the inability to actually come up with a plan on Kyoto and the media predictably going straight from their 'Martin can do no wrong' storyline to their 'Martin can do no right' storyline, the Conservative party is failing to make much of an impact with voters and are still polling below the combined vote of the Progressive Conservative and Reform parties back when they were still separate parties.

Rather than focusing on reducing Federal intrusion in Provincial affairs and putting tax cuts ahead of spending, the Conservatives seem to be bogged down in an attempt to convince minority voters to vote for them because they are willing (just in this one case?) to deny rights to one particular minority the other minorities don't like.

But besides all this, there's times when I see Harper in a scrum with reporters and he just has this look in this eye, and I can't help but feel that he's thinking, "If these dumbass journalists ask one more ignorant question which shows how little they know what their talking about, I'm going to make what Chrétien did to that protester look like a friendly greeting." Not that I don't sympathize sometimes, but that kind of thing comes with the territory, being a leader of a federal party and all.

And it's not just me thinking this and wondering, "Has anyone seen Stephen Harper?"

You put it all together, and I wouldn't be surprised to see Harper take a short walk in the mud¹ some time in the next year or two and announce that he is stepping down as leader of the Conservative party.

Which brings me to the reason I started writing this post in the first place, to speculate on a potential replacement for Harper. Now, Calgary Grit has a good post up handicapping potential replacements for liberal leader Paul Martin, but I thought that, rather than start with the prominent people, I would start with the qualities necessary for the job, and see if it brought anyone to mind. This way we won't be limiting ourselves to the obvious choices.

So what qualities would a good Conservative party leader have? (I'm trying to see this from the perspective of the typical Conservative voter which may be a bit of a stretch, but I'll do my best)

1. Ambition: One of the biggest problems with Harper's leadership has been the sense that he doesn't have the drive to do what's necessary to make the Conservatives into a party which can take power. A new leader would have to be someone who has shown a clear desire to set Canadian policy and to have clear ideas on what that policy should be - i.e. someone who really wants to run the country.

2. Improve relations with the U.S.: Given our strong economic and political ties with the Americans, it is essential that the new leader avoid getting dad angryimprove relations with our supremely powerful neighbours.

3. Proven dedication to Conservative priorities: For example, tax cuts and military spending (and not being happy with a budget which puts these off for years).

4. High Profile: While a party can succeed with a relative unknown at the helm, it would be advantageous to have someone already familiar to Canadians, especially to help with the trust factor which the Conservatives are struggling with.

So who fits these criteria? Stronach? Mackay? Lord? No, the answer is clearly: Paul Cellucci.

The timing is perfect since Cellucci is just coming to the end of his term as American ambassador to Canada. True, Cellucci is said to have a lucrative private gig set up but do we really think that the offer to become Prime Minister of Canada wouldn't lure him back into politics? If any public figure has shown an ambition to set Canadian policy over the last few years it has been Cellucci. Whether issuing vague warnings about our drug policies or rhetorically styling himself as the arbiter of Canadian sovereignty, he's probably made more headlines criticizing the government's actions than Harper has and Harper is the leader of the official opposition.

As for improving relations with the U.S., what could be better than having their former ambassador to us as our PM? Who could do a better job crafting Canadian policy to meet with the approval of the Bush administration than a man specifically appointed by them to manage our country?

In a similar vein, who could doubt the commitment to tax cuts and military spending of someone appointed by George Bush? And he not only has a significant public profile here in Canada, he's reasonably well known in the U.S. as well.

As an added bonus, Conservatives already like to dismiss any criticism of their policies as just being knee jerk anti-Americanism and that argument would be that much more effective with Cellucci officially running the party.

And finally, think of it from Cellucci's perspective. Is there a more time-honoured path to taking over the reins of an empire than by successfully running one of its outer provinces? I think not.

Sure, there may be some technical issues (e.g. citizenship) to overcome, but from where I stand it's all coming together for Cellucci in 2006.


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¹ Given 20 years of global warming and the difference in political tenure between Trudeau and Harper, I figure a long walk in the snow translates into a short walk in the mud.

She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature beef.

Paul Wells is doing a good job with the politics, but he's falling behind Doug's Dynamic Drivel in the race for most humourous blog. Doug's recent list of high-school writing class metaphors is great fun, even if "His vocabulary is as bad as, like, whatever."

The World's Most Dynamic e-business Marketing, Design and Consulting Agency

Via Darren Barefoot, I recommend this hilarious send-up of vague consulting-talk laden corporate websites.

Not all that long ago I had an interview with a company with a website quite similar to this one. As it turned out, there was a reason they didn't want to be too specific about their main lines of business.

Cheap Shot

I was doing my usual scan of the National Post's front page while waiting for the lights to change the other day and I saw that they were making some format changes.

My first thought was that maybe they cut the font size in half since, under the old format, they only ever had room to print one side of every issue. Alas, no.

I'm Just Sayin....

This is just a quick memo to any male readers in relationships that today's date is February 13.

The Essence of Cathood

While I'm in short post mode, I should mention Doug's great post from a week or two ago on cat haikus in which he really captured the spirit of a cat as a pet.

Here's a sample:

"Your mouth is moving;
Up and down, emitting noise.
I've lost interest."

or one which captures my personal philosophy of life:

"Most problems can be
Ignored. The more difficult
Ones can be slept through."