Ottawa Openfile: come unHenged...?

I think I've been admirably patient for a species not noted for its impulse control. But now that we've hit the second week of February flatfooted, it behooves me to ask: What the hell happened to Openfile's OttawaHenge photo contest? The one Trevor Pritchard announced on November 30, with a cash prize, and everythin'?

In the spirit of full disclosure, or possibly enlightened self-interest, I confess that some coyotes are not entirely disinterested in the outcome. Okay, I entered it. The idea of a sunset shining straight down the Sparks Street Mall tickled my semi-mythical fancy.

Also in the spirit of full disclosure, or possibly enlightened self-interest, I will note that I did my trademark lurk at the appointed hour, both of the days in the original contest period when an actual sun visibly set. Having taught numerous Fall Continuing Ed workshops in lurking, I think I might've noticed if anybody else had been doing so avec camera. They weren't.

Again in the spirit of full disclosure, or possibly enlightened self-interest, I confess that this turn of events had me rubbing my paws together in highly unseemly anticipation-slash-glee. I figured my entry had really decent odds, me being the only critter on two or four legs that was there to paw a shutter release.

But, noooooooooo... Mr. Pritchard, the morning of the first deadline, posted that sunsetty goodness had been lacking, so the deadline would change. He did not come out and state outright that there might've been only one entry. Loosey-goosey contest design ain't my problem, but I figured, oh what the heck. Maybe he doesn't run a lot of these. He didn't really post any rules -- ummm, other than the deadline -- so maybe he feels okay about changing contest rules - such as they are - after they're already out there.

Fourth Dwarf asked a buncha pointed questions about this on December 13. Since then, when we've run across one another in a back alley (we're both avid dumpster divers, for different reasons...) I've raised what passes for a querying eyebrow on a coyote, and asked, "Seen anything on an OttawaHenge winner yet?" Each time, he's shaken his head and grimaced, "No". Then we commence to scuffling over the pickin's. Woohoo!

But it's a little weird, ya know? Not the scuffling; the black-hole-like lack of a winner for a contest which was announced with a certain hoopla November 30, even if it was extended. The event's maestro may not have run many contests. I dunno - but the lack of caveats and conditions beyond the entry date was notable. But it seems to me that not setting ground rules beyond an entry deadline does not allow one to move the goalposts - twice - without making a token effort to broadcast who won the damn thing at some point. Sure I feel like the rug got pulled out from underneath me. But I'm a fair coyote. Somebody should win, even if it ain't moi. However badly my id may be pissed, you may surmise that my rambunctiously healthy doggy ego can probably take it.

When the Short Guy, always gimlet-eyed about such things, started asking questions in December, a comment from Mr. Pritchard thanked Dwarfy for noticing the contest. The lad also sidestepped 4D's questions with a degree of native talent which suggests that if this Openfile gig doesn't work out, he's still got lucrative career options writing non-reply reply scripts for federal ministers... but I digress.

Except that on this very blog, Trevor said, and I quote, "...we'll definitely be announcing a winner in January."

That's unequivocal. I believe that Trev, and Openfile, will want to make good on it. Now that we've landed flatfooted in the second week of February, 'n all. Possibly before Valentine's Day...

Chinese democracy, one fiction at a time...

That nuanced thrash-metal philosopher, Axl Rose, famously spent a decade trying to spit-glue together his Chinese Democracy album, an assault on the fictional nature of that concept.

Predictably, it was banned in China, spiritual home of the Staged One-Party-State News Event. North Korea may beg to differ, but I digress.

Here in Canada, between: the PM gettin' his freak on over heavy-handed message control, such that even most senior ministers are only allowed to read canned statements lashed together by half-smart li'l ReformaTory twerps in the PMO's rapidly-expanding Stephen Harper Information Torquing machine (The acronym says it all. But I digress again. To make up for not doing it last post, Ms. Zoom, ma'am...); Other ReformaTory twerps ginning up SunTV as a de facto party organ (heh...); And Immigration Minister Jason Kenney ordering his hapless civil servants to cobble up a, ummm, very special, immigration affirmation ceremony for his very special pals over at that self-same party organ, "And make it snappy!", we might seem to be well on our way toward a solidly domestic version of the Chinese democracy that it took Axl 10 years just to wrap his heavy-me(n)tal bandanna around and write about.

In maybe only a little more than half the time.

An overpowered media vehicle is doing its very best to impose a series of fictions about the current government's deeds, and the country as a whole, upon the mass consciousness. Those fictions, swallowed, would supplant something beautiful, real, and far more inconvenient and messy for current government inclinations.

The hilarity, for the rest of us, comes when that vehicle - inevitably - fishtails violently, busts loose, and screeches, upside-down, into the ditch. Witness the yuks when some StunTV (news?)weasel's brave statement, "Lets do it! We can fake the oath!" was dredged into the actual sunlight. Despite the best efforts of the PM and his gang to make the (real) media lie down, roll over, and beg, they apparently ain't cowed to the point where everybody can look away and ignore authoritarian absurdity.

In the spirit of fairness and balance, I should point out that the immigration minister has disavowed all knowledge. Cool. This has all sortsa well-worn precedent, established by both the fictional Secretary of the Impossible Mission Forces and the possibly-fictional minister's all-too-real spin doctors. Whenever a fiction-based scam goes sideways, the offishul playbook says to pile more fiction onto that sucker like crazy, then hoof somebody who isn't you under the bus. And self-righteously pretend to all and sundry that that little PMO-approved set piece dealt with it completely.

People, repeat after the coyote: "Repetition does not make an untrue thing, right!". Remembering that grouchy semi-mythical coyotes was born with their long pointy noses, where the minister appears to be growing his... as he speaks.

Phoning it in

For about six-odd millenia, human behaviour has more or less baffled us semimythical coyotes.

It is September. A neoconservative prime minister has his, ummm, fully transparent mitts, fully wrapped around the sooty levers of federal power, manipulatin' dog-knows-what with 'em. Summer's green leaves are beginning to turn colour. And perhaps most foreboding of all, our medicinal dark chocolate stash is damn near empty. We are necessarily forced toward the philosophical. You know -- cogitatin' on the big unanswerable questions.

Take the ever-thinner smartphone. Now so impossibly thin that it cannot spoil the drape of that summerweight silk Italian suit or Chanel shift that every smartphone owner wears. Because you can afford to own those, even after you sign your soul over to Satan, who administers all of the more serious phone data plans. I digress. Oopsy.

Nude, the latest devices would dance comfortably beneath a ten millimetre high limbo bar. Ummm, so, basically, so thin and delicate that many of the fone phashionistas (at least the ones on the Route 14 bus...) feel an urgent need to wrap their statusy, ever-so-svelte electronic fetishes in even fetishier stretchy rubber slipcases. Roots' f'rinstance, clocks in at three millimetres.

Since most of these elegant devices apparently now barely power themselves through an average working day before collapsing in an anorexic puddle of melted lithium ions somewhere just slightly south of your early afternoon Starbux break, would not that extra three millimetres you're gonna add to the thing anyway not be better dedicated to, say, battery space? Just askin'.

And I've also been lately pondering: why lately am I so attracted to the comfort of hot soup? And if I and my similarly disgraceful friends make off to a Chinatown eatery to demolish huge bowls of soup, are we guilty of wonton destruction?

Just askin' the big questions... it's what us coyotes do right now.

(Flickr image by Quosquos, licensed under Creative Commons)

At long last having pulled out a majority. . .

. . .Stephen Harper revealed his grand vision for the country to Canadians

Greasy pols, greasy polls and greasy poles

An election now lunges toward either the final gong or buzzer, I forget which, with a speed approaching terminal gravitational acceleration. Certain half-smart tory backroom operators who helped manipulate the damn thing in the first place have hit the ground. Not running gracefully, as they thought they would, but with aerodynamic qualities akin to lead pancakes.

It is telling that Stephen Harper has stomped on (m)any faces in his scramble for a majority. It is also telling, in a negative way, that he hasn't really told anybody what he would do with a majority if he got it.

But it is even more telling that some opinion polls place those unhinged socialists he keeps harpering on about, within hard spitballing range of "his" majority.

Citizenship fatigue, finally, maybe? Five years ago, in the face of a decayed liberal machine, Harper promised Reform-a-Tory honesty and transparency if elected. Since, he and his stable of hyper-partisan frat boys have ridden a breathtaking string of dishonesty, opacity and mean-spiritedness to where we are now.

Their fallback strategy when nailed - and there have been nailings aplenty - has been to wriggle, split hairs and misdirect. Say they're only doing what the Liberals did already. Maybe throw someone who's not named Harper under the bus.

That pristine Tory bus is gettin' pretty gory.

Then, if your name is Harper, you feign an eerily robotic approximation of calm reason to state, "Now, now, you know that's simply not true."

Provable lies, but they play real well with the rural base in Alberta. Also, apparently, with the Globe and Mail, which just endorsed the crud-covered incumbent as the best choice for PM. Because he's you know, a good financial manager. Yucko! As if!

Where was I? Oh yeah: so the reductio ad absurdem Con subtext is that they are now exactly what the Libs were, right? The devil's spawn of which their endless barrage of attack ads do constantly remind?

Seems like the copious backsplatter from all that ugly ordnance may finally be soiling the tailored blue Harry Rosen suits of the firing crews. One can hope.

This election ain't a done deal. What we seem to be learning as the campaign closes is that liberals are still wandering the political wasteland, and that conservatives have emulated them, badly. Could explain the surge of a former fourth-place long shot who seems pretty upbeat and positive.

How it'll play at the real polls, as opposed to the fleeting snapshots of opinion polls, is anybody's guess.

If it's a Tory majority, I still have my doggy helmet, flack jacket and poisoned ink supply from Ontario's Mike Harris years. Anything else, that yodelling, yipping laugh you hear in the distant night after the ballot count will be moi.

Meantime, I'll stock in the English breakfast tea and a crumpy or six for a big, very early-morning wedding. I approve of weddings. They're a welcome diversion. And more important than politics.

Oar not...

It's unclear at the moment, what with different sources touting vastly different he-said-she-said versions of the story on Sunday. But it seems at least likely that the reason the incumbent minority PM is so certain that those costly new stealth fighter planes he's set his heart on would cost ludicrously less, by at least half, than the figures that every other financial and military authority other than the PM and the Department of National Defence has come up with, is because they're ummm, gliders.

But us coyotes can see the, ummm, logic. Yeah. That's it. Logic. Because this solves everything. All the haters who've pointed out that our
economically-trained PM has never actually practiced economics - nor, apparently, economy of any kind - look like losers this time.

Because ordering motorless planes saves a veritable billions-and-billions bundle on up-front costs and downline engine maintenance. And it'll put the Canadian military at the tippy-top forefront of those petroleum conservation and low carbon footprint thingies. Just what the country needs to counterbalance that plethora of negative tar sands environmental impacts, I'm sure. Not to mention how much stealthier they'll be than everybody else's stealth fighters, if they don't make any noise.

How to make 'em go, then? Look no further than Canada's proud and ancient voyageur tradition, people! Just borrow the Olympic rowing team's supply of high-tech carbon fibre oars (to match the high-tech carbon fibre wings, y'unnerstand...) and paddle them suckers! Using penitentiary prisoners as galley slaves would, without a Tory doubt, save huge bucks on the big prison-building schema, too!

All done within budget, just like those prudent, conservative fiscal managers said they would! Problem solved! Mission accomplished! Where have I heard that line before? Never mind! How could I have ever doubted?

Stockholm Syndrome

Well, since today's Ottawa Stun's screaming front page compares Michael Ignatief to Chairman Mao for mentioning, ummm, flowers in last night's debate - 'cuz we all know only Alberta-tarsands-hatin' godless commies like flowers - it's time to bring the smaller, feistier, crazier counterpropaganda machine we know as Coyote News back outta mothballs. Excuse the smell.

It may also be time to point out that godless Chinese commies have invested in a multibillion-dollar gooey black glop of the tar sands themselves. I'm unsure of the implications for godless communism, neocon theology or the filthy strip mine formerly known as the northern half of Wild Rose Country (oops). But I imagine I'm the only one so confused. Everybody else seems sure of their facts, however specious. I also imagine I digress again. Excuse the smell.

Over at Knitnut today, Zoom is wondering how people can bring themselves to vote for Stephen Harper. She ain't the only one. Poll after poll since the election began has depicted conservative approval ratings floating airily above the rest, into something not far off majority territory. Harper's contempt for parliament and, really, anybody who isn't Stephen Harper, as well as numerous scandals; issues of, ummm, human resources in the backroom; and criminal and procedural slams, all seem to slide off his hunched, oily back like so much heavy crude...

I blame Stockholm Syndrome. Hence my whacked-out counterpoint to today's calculated Stun Mao inhibitor: five years ago, a neocon terrorist kidnapped this country and held it hostage. He and his terrorist crew began doing everything they could to degrade the country's existing reputation and institutions.

Initially, most citizens were appalled. But after five years of abusive, coercive brainwashing, the hostages started feeling sympathetic for that poor Mr. Harper. Everybody throwing up roadblocks in his way, every time he tried to do the least reasonable little thing. Read that last sentence any way ya want.

Even the pundits started to say "Look. He's changed. He's become so much more reasonable". Well, except for that pesky prorogation thing. And that pesky stonewalling thing. And that pesky information control thing. And those pesky "throw all the executive assistants under the bus when their ministers get caught with their mitts in either flagrante delicto, the cookie jar, the pork barrel, the office supplies, or the back door of the institute for lame statistical reasoning" things. Depending on the day.

Yeah, well. History has proved the pundits pretty much wrong about Brian Mulroney's wonderfulness, too.

Harper hasn't changed. He spent much of last evening's debate holding his usual face in a flabby rictus determined by his PR handlers to resemble, as closely as possible, Dopey the Dwarf. (Sorry, Fourth Dude. I know the Dopester is a relation...)

They determined that it made him look innocuous and reasonable. Zoom, whom I respect much more, determined that he actually looked scary. Good instinct, that. Keep Stockholm Syndrome in mind, and go with it...

The (completely) unreliable narrative

It used to be that unreliable narratives were a device of true artists. Such as, say, Joseph Conrad, considered still to be a master of the novel.

Us semimythical coyotes have gained a certain smaller, more folklore-ish rep as unreliable narrators in prairie cultures with storytelling traditions. I admit we may tend to fudge ummm, small details in the interests of extending a good shaggy dog narrative. In this ramshackle blog's salad days, we had quite a snappy repartee on the roles of unreliable narrators. Begun, if memory serves, by our departed Muse.

But dissembling doggies got nuthin' on the current crop of political operators. As a cog in the unreliable narrator biz, I feel increasingly insulted by their rapid-fire repeater talking points as they attempt to, quote, "seize the narrative". These guys don't give a beaver's butt (or posterior of another rodent of your choice. Porcupine's patoot? I digress...) about the all-important kernel of truth any more. Every good fiction needs it. Yet sucking deeply from the pressurized cylinders of rarified weirdness inside their bubble/hothouse/echo-chamber/whatever, the minority ruling party has convinced itself that voters won't notice it's tossed truth aside completely.

Tasting power has made 'em kinda hallucinaTory. Sad really. I'm supposed to be the critter with the loose grip on reality.

I think the blatant, repeated fibbage bears on the current much-discussed-and-lamented election malaise, particularly in the under-35 cohort. Can't blame 'em. Being born in the path of a relentless tsunami of consumer advertising has made 'em awesome bullshit detectors. Faced with an eternal flush of overspun, overwhelming effluent, of which politics has become a pathological subset, most put the shields up and pointedly slope off to higher, drier ground.

Awhile back, some amoral backroom operator decided they no longer needed to pay lipservice even to the tiny grain of truth that good fictions rely upon. Because just making crap up "works". Well, yeah. For a while. Crudely. But blowing off an entire rising generation is a spectacularly shortsighted tactic for democracy and the nation as a whole.

Neocon backrooms harbour teams of strategists, spin doctors and writers whom I imagine are considered in their small, specialized circles to be "artists" at what they do. By the logic they themselves surely would write into Stephen Harper or John Baird's or Tony Clement's briefing books if they'd thought of it, that makes 'em, ummm... con artists. Ba-da-bomp. Rimshot.

If you're a wanna-be government whose much-vaunted base seems to be a bunch of pissed off old poops, and you're running out of time to nail down a majority before they die, and you're on a self-assigned mission to change the ethos of an entire country against its will, it makes a Pyrrhic kind of sense to lie your way into power. And at what cost to the rest of us?

* * * Update * * *

Oh, and? When you finally do see fit to artistically insert a kernel of truth in your narrative? Make sure it matches the matter at hand.
Pro-tip: Do not screw with one of Canada's most trusted - and feisty - Parliamentary officers...

Stirring the election pot. And licking it.

Grandad coyote was an austere guy. The sort of dog one would associate with a large framed portrait frowning severely down on a big, lustrous boardroom table surrounded by overstuffed chairs gliding on discrete casters. A portrait of the sort one might, indeed, associate with the founder of a well-established semimythical enterprise.

I know it may surprise some of you who have noted my, ummm, occasional case of pottymouth, but Grandad very much discouraged expletives of the anglo-saxon monosyllabic sort. Well, what the hell else do you call it when your breath sometimes betrays a swig or two from the occasional toilet? I digress.

I understand this credo had something to do with a long-ago day when the world was very young, when he and his callow young littermates holed up in a culvert, smoked way too many green hayseed cigarettes rolled in pages from yellowback novels, and uttered every filthy word any of 'em could think up. Family history offers no clues as to why they considered this plan sound in the first place. I blame youth. Nowadays, I imagine they'd all drink Red Bull until they ran in confused circles and peed down their own legs while hacking WiFi signals, or something.

Anyway, by the end of the day, they all felt so nauseated they swore off (heh...) swearing for life. Come to that, I don't think any of 'em smoked, either. Score one for proto aversion therapy. Oops... another digression.

Anyway. When severely riled, Grandad would admit to "having my dander up". Someone of whose conduct he generally disapproved, he might allow, was "a so-and-so". Truly egregious types, he called "stinkers". For one totally beyond the pale, he reserved the terrifying term "Dirty Potlicker".

You did not want to be someone whom Grandad called a Dirty Potlicker.

I am uncertain to this day of the true etymological origins of this prairie epithet, but the tone with which he uttered it told me all I need to know. Oh, I've seen attempts to define it (1) (2), but I'm pretty sure, on the evidence, that Grandad meant something a whole bunch worse.

Could explain why, at times much like now, when he scanned the election news in the original Calgary Eye Opener, he could be heard muttering "Dirty Potlickers!!!" under his doggy breath. Over and over and over.

Let the mud wrestling begin...

It doesn't take a cranky semimythical doggie's sahnsitive schnozz to smell the soft reek of an unwanted election hardening. The finance minister positively beamed as he spooled up his precast talking points with yesterday's interviewers, that his prudent budget was, no, nay, never intended to provoke an election. Because you know, his government would never indulge in that kind of game playing.

Ptui. And yes, motivated canines can spit as well as cats, anytime.

The PM must feel relief at ditching the mime show of interest in the nation's policy good. I'm sure it's been a strain. Now he can get back to his hyperpartisan self, start smearing other parties as the irresponsible motivators - those jerks - and get on with his real agenda. One more tiresome crack at that elusive majority.

He is far from the first PM to maneuver thus. It's as if he has combed and taken to heart every instance of political gamesmanship for the past 40 or 50 years. But only from comic books. Finer nuances have been lacking from the beginning. And every time the PM or his wunderkind perceive that they got away with another one, they dumb their playbook down another notch, to even cruder ploys.

Hence the near-permanent barrage of contemptuous US-Republican-style ads slagging the opposition leader's character and telling Canadians - in terms of the lowest possible denominator - "Tories good. Others evil".

Finally in the last couple of weeks, emboldened by a growing flood of character and corruption issues starting to jet out from behind the PMO's crumbling disciplinary dike, opposition parties have started throwing back smears of their own. Parliamentary politics lately has become like hippos mud wrestling in a smallish plastic playpool. Hardly germane to any watcher, but unavoidably backsplattertastic.

Lost in that storm is anything like discussion of actual platforms or policies. The best we can hope for is the rote equivalent of a Grade 11 Pep Club Coordinator's high school election promises of free beer in the water fountains. Meant to charm superficially for a moment, but unbelievable, unattainable, and after the spray settles, undelivered.

Very well. Let the mud wrestling begin. But ask yourself: what the hell are federal elections actually supposed to be about? And based on that, maybe ask a candidate or two a question. Or two. And possibly keep at 'em until you get real answers.

Let Bigfoot be!

The last day or two, I've seen an unfamiliar term. At least one media story has characterized the PM's treatment of international development sock-puppet minister Bev Oda as "Bigfooting".

Us semimythical critters have a circuit. We all know everybody else. I'm proud and privileged to say that back in the day I shared stages with "the" Bigfoot when we gigged psychedelic festivals at the height of his fame. Later, after the biz lost its innocence, went commercial, and the suits and beancounters and copyright grifters co-opted everything that was good and pure, Ol' Biggie took to the nostalgia tour circuit to keep hairy body and soul together. When I had backstage passes, I'd look for him in the greenroom and catch up over a complimentary sody pop or two.

Ol' Biggie was one of the true giants, an enigmatic prince of a guy who was talented beyond belief. It was perhaps inevitable that a fire that burned so brightly would start to consume itself. But even during his later, well-documented struggles with the dark, self-destructive downsides of early fame, he never lost his innate sweetness, his openness or his generosity. His subsequent choice to become a virtual recluse was one he took to protect himself, and one that nobody who knew him would begrudge. I don't even know how to find him anymore, really. But I'm glad he finally got clean and sober.

So, if Harper has the temerity to think he can ever authentically Bigfoot anybody, I say only this:

"Prime Minister, I served with Bigfoot, I knew Bigfoot, Bigfoot was a friend of mine. Prime Minister, you're no Bigfoot."

The colour of poppies

A day or two ago, one of this city's newspapers rapped a local peace group's white poppy campaign for civilian war dead, disparaging it as "a bunch of hippies giving big group hug (sic) and hoping for peace." Editorial reaction elsewhere is nearly as churlish, leaning toward telling "the peaceniks" to butt out of the official red poppy drive. The Royal Canadian Legion is unamused. It apparently has the poppy copyrighted. And maybe poppyrighted.

One can find an individual veteran or two who sees nothing wrong with the idea, but most news seems to hold crankier quotes, working up a fine lather in the week before Remembrance Day. Discourse in this country has gotten impolite everywhere, not just in that asylum on the hill.

Canada's last veteran from that long-ago unpleasantness just died recently, but when I was a slightly younger coyote, there were still any number of people who had served in the First World War, living their lives. They dwelt on future walkers, wheelchairs and care homes rarely, if at all.

One, whom I happened across quite often as he hiked in the foothills near Calgary, was one of the most pacific men I have ever met. I don't think he ever raised his voice about anything. I do not recall that he spoke about his part in that conflict, either, except to mention that he'd spent two years at a sanitarium in southern Ontario, recovering from tuberculosis after the war ended. He also mentioned humourously, in passing, exactly once, how he and other soldiers in the trenches would amuse themselves holding cootie derbies and laying penny bets, after picking lice off of themselves to race up broomstraws. There wasn't much else amusing going on, obviously. He never spoke of war otherwise, and when others did around him, a quietly pained expression crossed his usually-happy face.

He always kept a red-flocked paper poppy pinned to the lapel of his topcoat. I, being a coyote, did not trouble myself as to why. But one who knew him told me he felt bound to honour his old comrades beyond November 11. And in the way it has with semimythical coyotes, the west wind told me even later that he had been invalided out of the trenches of northern Europe just at the end of the last miserable winter before the Battle of Passchendaele.

There's not much more to go on but supposition. But I think he may have been - by the simple good luck of nearly dying from tuberculosis at the right time - one of the few in his regiment to live after the generals ran it into the machine guns. And that he wanted, as long as he could, to carry the standard of their memory. On the unspoken evidence, he seemed to value civilian lives just as highly as military ones. I think he approved highly of peace. I rather suspect he would see no difference between white poppies and red ones. But then, we dogs are colourblind...

Vote. Just vote.

Y'know, it's been a long four years. You'd never realize it from reading all the crap I've posted here, but us coyotes hate blogging politics.

Unlike the mayor himself, who somehow always manages to word things so that he squirms away from taking any actual responsibility for anything negative that occurs on his watch, I blame Larry O'Brien. He has been so egregiously bad that something hadda be said.

Being a yapper, I said it. Now I'm nearly hoarse. Well actually, I'm still a coyote. For those among you who are not trained aesthetes, horses are bigger 'n dumber, kick ya in the slats when offended, and have way less awesome ears than coyotes. But I digress.

All I really want to say here is that Monday is municipal election day in Ontario. I really don't even care who the hell you vote for. Just vote. Because the way it's supposed to work is that the more people participate, the more representative are the decisions they make. Theoretically. If some schmucks happen to be elected - and schmucks very likely will be elected - at least they will represent everybody.

Tomorrow. Just vote. You'll make a very old, hoarse semimythical coyote very happy. I'm pretty sure after tomorrow I can finally shut the hell up about egregiously bad mayors and get back to my true calling: bloggin' mumumelons. Chasing your cat. Stuff that matters. It's time.

Lawn sign credit: firelarryobrien.com. In no way affiliated with the Elgin Street Irregulars, but some of us like their style.

A Big Yellow Taxi moment

This past weekend, the (almost former) mayor piled more, ummm, vision, into his "vision for Ottawa": (yet) another suburb, to be serviced by a ring road plowed through the city's green belt. It was at one and the same time a Big Yellow Taxi moment and a heartfelt cry for help. Involving emergency laser eye surgery.

Us coyotes can't help noticing that most of the mayor's recent vente speculative fictions involve the thoughtless trashing of the city's public open spaces: running electric rail along the Ottawa River Parkway; a Lansdowne Park deal that bobbled lands in the public trust into private developers' waiting hands, with a nifty side deal to carve big a new exhibition space out of the southern greenbelt; and now the ring road idea.

Now, the green belt has been eyed with avarice and intent by developer types for most of its five-decade run. To them, it is 20,350 hectares of prime open space ideally situated for plunking down any old building they care to name. If only they could get their frustrated mitts on it.

A lot has changed since a rather well-regarded city planner guy named Jacques Gréber suggested the idea in 1950, and it may well be in the public interest to revisit its whithers and wherefores. But I'm unconvinced that Mayor Larry is the guy to shepherd the process. He has already amply demonstrated a really unfortunate bias toward what us coyotes call "inappropriate development", along with a serious disregard for the niceties of due process, and an utter lack of intelligent consideration of consequences.

We coyotes, of course, are biased in an entirely other direction. You might say hizzoner's purported big picture schemes hit us where we live. Because, well, they do.

But the public open spaces that the city under this mayor has already dealt away - or wants to - are treasures. If citizens decide to give 'em up after proper debate, fine. But it should only be for the right reasons, and for a fair payback. Even, one might hazard, and I am aware of the irony of my using this word, as a part of a vision. If possible, one grander, more inspiring and more cohesive than badly focused pipe dreams.

At the very least, you'd better damn good and sure before you throw away something as scarce as green space in a city. Because if there's one thing us coyotes know, it's that once you pave paradise, it's lost. And as Joni sang back in her chirpier, more soprano-y days, ya don't know what ya got 'til it's gone.

How dumb am I supposed to be, again...?

I'm on a roll. While I sucked my paws over the state of federal politics yesterday, the incumbent mayor, in what I imagine he hoped was a display of charming candour, finally admitted out loud what sentient Ottawattamies have pretty much realized since their last municipal election-night hangovers hit: that his first half-term was a disaster cratered with "rookie mistakes".

Oh, that his nibs finally got anything even half right is fairly momentous. But us semimythical coyotes still find him charmless. Being played for a simpleton by someone who lacks the chops to do the job right does that to us... I digress. That phrase is getting to be such a trademark that I'm gonna put that on a baseball cap and market it. I digress again...

It may be that the mayor figured that if he copped to his record of awfulness, he could then, whenever after it comes up, do what spin doctors call "changing channels". This is saying, in effect, "I've already dealt with that, it's ancient news, now let's just move on and talk about what really matters. Which is anything but that.". Watch for it.

It was also the sort of calculated move that suggests the guy is temporarily listening to his store-bought brain instead of the winging it that is his wont. Polling at less than half the support of your leading rival apparently focuses even the most scattered mind. Oh, he fondly imagines himself as a big ideas guy, but he's just scattered.

And what are we to make of what David Reevely calls "Larry 2.0"? The things he imagines to be his latter-day signature victories - like flogging the very public Lansdowne Park to the first very private commercial developers that had the balls to just ask for it, whilst shredding due process - are, well, who he is.

Self-proclaimed 2.0 status aside, worrying signs of that problematic unselfaware hubris remain. The guy who thought he was going to ride into Dodge City and change things all by hisself didn't even know what he didn't know then. He has never grasped important nuances. Driving a city this size on a learner's permit is dangerous egotism. And he's still more than a little hung up on how important being a 'multimillionaire' makes him - in multiple statements. (Read 'em if ya have the stomach.)

It takes more than a bunch of hired mouthpieces who are all about an election-year surface wax & buff to change the fact of a man whose flaws are deeply embedded in his personality. Four more years of Larry has a very high probability of being four more years of the same, no matter what he - or the backroom - think they're floggin'.

"Smartest guy in the room"

We coyotes understand that reviewers of Stately Glob columnist Lawrence Martin's new book about Stephen Harper have latched onto the PM's venom toward small and large-L liberals as noteworthy.

It is, not because it's anything new, but because it helps begin to explain the current malaise in this country's political landscape. The fact that Conservatives' main rebuttal so far is to label Mr. Martin a "large-L liberal sympathizer", like that alone should fully explain and dismiss his findings, just underlines it.

The PM, portrayed by his fan(s?) as the "smartest guy in the room" is indeed a great one for convoluted trickiness. Yet uncompromising tactics ranging from within the pale to, ummm, less so, all aimed at, quote, "killing the Liberal brand", have done little but shoot up his feet, and the rest of the place. That's a problem, not just for his political fellows who lust after that elusive parliamentary majority, but for the country.

Us coyotes have seen plenty of smartest guys in the room screw up royally through lack of wisdom. I could get all semimythically pedantic here about the ginormous abyss separating "smart" and "wise", but just gimme that one for argument's sake. I'm busy making a point, here.

Which is that any political guy who's so heavily invested in the tenet that all other political stripes in a democracy are the work of the Antichrist, to be seared from the face of the earth with brimstone, is no friend of the nation. Kicking that warm, fuzzy little dream out to its (il)logical extreme, while no doubt heady to some party hacks, has little to do with democracy. Or the reasonable checks and balances on power that help sustain it. For the democratic experiment to remain on the level, conservative yin needs liberal yang. Or vice versa. We coyotes are hazy on eastern religious concepts. We come from someplace else.

The parliamentary democracy that has evolved over the better part of a thousand years works best when players are flexible. That means taking the time to understand other viewpoints, respect for those outside your policy hothouse, and seeing the good of the nation - and all the diverse people and viewpoints it comprises - as the big-picture goal.

We coyotes like to keep our yellow eyes fixed on the big picture. Ya kinda hafta, watching six millenniums' worth of evolving human shenanigans. It's that, or rump of skunk and madness.

One of that grande vista's truisms is that any one national leader seldom bears in huge ways on citizens' personal lives, unless he/she is truly, determinedly awful. Oh. And true awfulness can be attained by chasing partisan goals to the exclusion of everything else, including actual, considered governance. Considered governance which, one might think, would be the point of being a prime minister.

I'm just sayin'...

"Not finished yet" - Mayor Larry

Dear god. What could possibly be left for him to screw up...?

Oh, hey, StatsFans!

The statistic I'm most urgently concerned about right now is a disturbing spike in the unreported proportion of Canadians that think Stockwell Day is an unreported bonehead.

Not that we coyotes would ever resort to ad hominem slurs ourselves, y'understand...

Going mediaeval on our asses

As a semimythical coyote, I recognise that mythical cosmogonies, including mine, may be internally consistent, yet correspond only roughly with what most people think of as reality. One side of the (mythical) line, I'm a totemic critter of some religious import. The other, I'm just a mouthy talking doggie with a sideline in eating your cat. Having had about 6,000 years' practice at being semimythical, I've learned to deal.

So it's with a practiced and critical eye that I watch the government attempt to build its own mythical cosmogony. You know, the one where empirical science never happened, and all must defer to the Prime Minister's gut. The one that spills out over the dinner-plate belt buckle he wears once a year at the Calgary Stampede, and tells him that basing decisions on actual facts is less desirable than just making crap up and calling it the truth.

Having had his mythical dogma (heh...) called out so often by the empirical facts on stuff like safe injections sites, mandatory sentencing, rising crime rates and blahblahblah ad nauseam, he's apparently started screwing over the people who collect these facts, such as Statistics Canada. Because nothing is more inconvenient than having your irrefutable gut feelings and cherished truthinesses shot to hell by your own government agency.

Give the guy credit. He and his base are doing their best to willfully ignore the entire Renaissance. You know, that insignificant 400-odd years when empirical science, ummm, evolved. Would they prefer the ignorance and superstition that came before? For an entire modern nation? How's that for going mediaeval on our asses?

As an over-opinionated quadruped with long experience in issues that rise when one's core beliefs reject the, you know, actual world in which you must exist, I gotta say: no matter how stubbornly you cherish that mythiness, sooner or later reality whacks ya upside the head. How's that for cognitive dissonance? And how ya gonna deal with it?

Six AM on Nepean Point

Nights, lately, we coyotes have spent on the move, too hot, too restless to sleep. At the end of one such, I dogtrotted to Nepean Point at sunrise. Near the base of Champlain's statue, I settled on my hind legs, panting a little, thinking to watch the shadows of the bridges shorten on the moving water.

"Nice view, isn't it?" said a near voice.

I was surprised. Not too many people actually see semi-mythical coyotes in this city. They usually dismiss us as figments of imagination. We encourage this, and in fact know a few small charms to help it along. This was an unusual person. I looked over my shoulder into a very tanned face with intelligent eyes.

"It is," I agreed, turning, taking in details of the man in the shade of the statue's plinth: clean copper-sand hair as dark and weatherbeaten as his skin, shabby-neat clothes, open book overturned beside him, indeterminate age, relaxed raffish air. In the growing brightness over his shoulder was Parliament Hill, clouds piling over it into a sky the same deep blue as his eyes.

"I like to catch the breeze off the river about this time of day," he offered.

"It's good," I agreed. "In this heat." I pointed my pointy nose into a scrap of moving air and sniffed gratefully.

"I like the heat," he said. "I spend six months a year cursing the cold."

Then, seeing I wasn't quite poised to flit, as we coyotes often are wont, he began to talk. He seemed have traveled and to know about minerals. He told stories about planting gardens in glacial sand deposits in the Arctic, of holding huge black onyxes in his hands, of illegally moiling for opals in the Australian outback, of diving for emeralds at the bases of South American waterfalls.

His current state suggested none had stayed in his hands, if ever he'd held them. He was obviously knowledgeable and intelligent, but there was hazy point in each story where the facts as I understood them seemed to drag their anchors and begin to drift.

It also might be that he was being completely truthful about the way he saw the world. I did not see fit to get into this. It might, I decided, seem a touch rich coming from a six-odd-millenia-old, semimythical talking dog. Who's not really from around these parts.

His stories had a humorous flair. He seemed serene about the wealth he did not have. He was amiable. I enjoyed his company. That was enough.

As the breeze died in the growing heat, I stood. He closed his book, placed it carefully into a battered pack, and uncoiled elegantly from the base of the statue. We walked companionably down the hill. At the bottom he wished me a very fine day. I wished him an equally fine day. He turned toward the Market, and I turned toward the alleys of Centretown.

It occurred to me as I re-entered the city's heated maze that many of the elite who sit in that fairy-tale Gothic-revival castle just across the bay, the one that had hovered over his shoulder while we spoke, probably wouldn't have much regard for my nameless new friend. I think that perhaps he wouldn't have much use for them, either...