Barking up the Big E-Bike Ban

Yesterday, the National Capital Commission moved to ban E-bikes -- at least honkin' big ones -- from recreational paths. Public consultations, fines for perps, and everythin'.

Don't get me wrong. I love e-rides. One of the biggest hoots I've had in the past year was hijacking somebody's robo-mower for an exhilarating l'il motocross through Greely. Hilarity with a minimal carbon footprint! I digress.

Normally, us coyotes see the NCC's double-mittsful of planners as, ummm, Double-Bureaucratic Twits. Like many bureaucrats and planners, removed from the real world. Except by about times two. Maybe squared. More likely cubed.

But on the Big E-Bike Ban, I'm gonna go all Randall Denley on ya, and agree with the twits, maybe actually be one myself. I reluctantly concede that they might get it right by accident. Sometimes.

The cycles in the NCC's crosshairs are the ones that look and act pretty much like full-fledged motor scooters.

Dealers of these things say they're being targetted unfairly. And kinda ignore the fact that like their gas-snorting kin, they're plenty heavy and drive at city traffic speeds. Sure, e-scooters sport pedals, but they're evolutionary vestigial tails -- near-fictional afterthoughts to skootch owners past motor scooter license laws on a technicality. Honest owners will admit their spiffy e-rides are way too heavy for such sweaty nonsense.

I mostly blame bicycle brain. Cyclists that think they're not on real vehicles, and so are not subject to real road rules.

Bicycle brainiacs do all sortsa crap. Elbowing walkers on sidewalks, blowing off stop signs and red lights with that cute li'l semicircular sidestreet deke that abets the private fiction that they haven't done anything illegal or dangerous. On recreational paths, bicycle brain causes 'em to barely nod to the, ummm, strong suggestion to ring their bells when they're overtaking unaware pedestrians in speedy silence. Even if there are only a thousand or so in the city right now, calling what amount to full-on scooters that weigh a couple hundred pounds and go 50 or 60 kph, "bicycles" and letting 'em loose on recreational paths is just askin' for disjointed tails. Or worse. And I know from disjointed tails.

So just this once I tip my semi-mythical hat to the bureaucratic twits. Bask in your coyote kudos! We know it can't last...

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?

Varmints... and varmints

Full disclosure: Us coyotes are no fans of getting our fuzzy butts shot off. Especially by half-tons full of baseball-capped pseud cowboys, careening full tilt across the foothills, blasting merrily and often, with a astonishing range of rifles apparently all called "varmint guns". I gather that rural stop signs are often also varmints... I digress.

Another disclosure: Granny coyote used to excel at a very tricky high-speed dance that would lure drivers of such half-tons over big rocks that bent wheels, busted springs and punched holes in oil pans, while younger coyotes - hell, even passing jackrabbits - laughed our fuzzy butts off at safe distance. Granny was quite a joker.

Just so you know where I'm comin' from on this one. I have watcha might call an opinion about that long-gun registry the current government is so hellbent on, ummm, gunning down.

Really, the news a couple of days back that the US National Rifle Association was lending somewhat less-than-moral support to Canadian gun lobbyists was hardly a surprise, despite quick government and lobbyist denials. Their patented paranoid-nutbar brochure spiels about ill-defined freedom and the registry existing "so the police can come and take away all your guns in advance of a Nazi takeover" were cropping up here with tiresome regularity.

See, here's what I don't get. People drive cars, and need both operator and vehicle licenses to do so. Good idea, given that vehicles are, in the wrong hands and/or in the wrong situation, two-ton-plus weapons. As much as I enjoy hanging my tongue out the shotgun-side window into the breeze when Aggie drives me somewhere, I know they pack enough potential kinetic energy to kill.

Yet start talking about licenses for machines expressly designed to make enough kinetic energy to kill, and suddenly a bunch of people, many of whom ought to know better, start yelling "FREEDOMFREEDOMFREEDOM" at the tops of their leathery lungs. Yes, yes, yes, I know some weapons are useful tools for farmers and duck hunters too. A firearms registry does not make them any less useful to those who use 'em that way. Even supposing that gun ownership does equal freedom, freedom still equals responsibility. And registering weapons that blast big, irreparable holes in living organisms as a design feature is a reasonable, responsible thing to do in a civil democratic society, no matter what the hell the NRA, or anyone else, may yell at the top of their intriguingly well-rehearsed, very well-financed, voices.

That's the evil genius of the NRA - managing to conflate owning a gun with a big, hazy, near-undefinable motherhood word, using a withering barrage of fallacious arguments. The evil genius of the Conservative party is in playing politics with those acquired arguments, then preemptively accusing anyone who calls 'em out on it of 'playing politics'. And people call me a varmint!

As one of my coyote brethren from the Alberta days says, "Fallacious arguments during crooked 7-card stud seem to be all there are anymore..."

5.0 on the Richter scale, 1:41 P.M.

A noise like the cliché freight train, a lot of office towers doing The Log Drivers' Waltz, a few busted chimneys, one or two possible cracked foundations. No major injuries in Ottawa, except to our egos after the West Coast started collectively hooting at us for even noticing 5.0.

Although a guy fishing off of a bridge near the epicentre in Quebec, about 50 kilometres north of here, did have to drive himself to the ER after the bridge sorta dropped out from underneath him...

What's My Sign?

After the city's long recovery from "Technically Beautiful" (rightly) being laughed out of the park a decade back, Ottawa's National Capital Commission is again on the hunt for a new city slogan. Ummm, an official one.

The old one, you will recall, left itself hanging wide open to the fair and obvious question, "If you're only technically beautiful, what are you, really?"

After that fail - the poor thing only absorbed about four months' hooting before it crawled, whimpering, battered and bloody, into a dumpster - the NCC's committee thumbsuck will, no doubt, be epic.

The Petfinder's business columnist sees this as a problem. He's probably right. First, because these guys are mostly business-oriented, and figure the slogan to attract business. Yawn! Second, committees above a certain size - and you can count on this committee being above a certain size - level creativity into radioactive wastelands anyway. Members fancy themselves creative with a certainty that, mathematically, works out to be the inverse of their actual abilities. Cubed.

Oh, they consult. They collect options. Then one of a couple of things happens: One is that they each champion something different. In the inevitable verbal brawls, some peacemaker suggests that fatal word, "compromise", so they take what looks like a promising slogan, and keep grafting on bits of other, lamer, ones until the thing is DOA. But everybody on the committee can boast about their "important input". The other is that they quickly, ecstatically agree on the absolute lamest option, then skeeve off to Hy's for celebratory expense-account triple scotches.

On that note, I want y'all to know that us coyotes are creative. With a certainty that, mathematically, works out to be the inverse of our actual abilities. Cubed. And our fave slogans are, in no particular order:

• Ottawa: Funner Than Stephen Harper's Sex Life!
• Ottawa: Not Enough Porta-Potties on Canada Day!
• Ottawa: Not Fucking Toronto!

But our committee is soliciting as many other options - with exclamation points to punch 'em up - as possible. Triples all 'round!

Dispatch from the culture wars

I tried to file this post earlier, but all the boomtastic artillery barrages convinced me to hunker in the trenches awhile and picnic on delicious, delicious Spam instead. We coyotes like our bushy tails (and their attached asses) and are not above saving 'em by sittin' on 'em... I digress. It's a trademark. Deal with it.

Anyway, the big guns wheeled out a couple weeks back when an independent pollster interviewed on CBC was asked what he'd advise the Liberals to do in the face of recent government actions. He dropped the catchy soundbite, "Culture War!"

Conservative reaction was a collective howl to lynch - well, really, anybody not conservative - for even bringing the idea up.

Not long after, a conservative senator felt the need to tell pro-choice aid organizations to, quote, "Shut the fuck up" before they lose (even more) government support. Meanwhile, others in another quarter felt no such need for prudent silence - they held a big anti-abortion rally on Parliament Hill.

In the followup sideshow, CBC struck a panel to investigate itself for anti-Tory bias. This although pretty much every major private electronic and print media chain is currently held by proprietors much more conservative than not.

This speaks to semi-mythical coyotes of the onset, proper, of witch hunting season in the hamlet of Ottawa. The PM's backlog of spite and venge, and his unusual enthusiasm for blunt instruments wielded fast and capriciously, has a lot of semi-important, formerly semi-independent, people in this hamlet cowed. The truth of what "arms-length body" actually means in the face of a determined attack is sinkin' in.

Social conservatives everywhere seem to have gained a grandiose sense of aggrieved entitlement to an unbalanced concept of redress. Even in power, they plead that they're victims. The cognitive dissonance must be truly crippling.

But us coyotes, even with our semi-mythical tin hats jammed firmly down, don't have any trouble seeing who's pulling the firing lanyards on the heaviest cultural artillery in a generation. It really does look like a cultural war from out here in the trenches - just not the quite the one toward which the party in near-power is trying to misdirect your attention. It is well to remember that no matter how big the lie gets, ya gotta always pay attention to that guy behind the curtain... and not shut the fuck up about it.

Rahim redux

The quiet sucking sound at ex-MP Rahim Jaffer's parliamentary hearing Wednesday was his former pals vacuuming the last of his political oxygen from the room. The whumpwhump as they tossed him under the crosstown 95 was just punctuation.

It's taken me a couple of days to puzzle out what went down, because us coyotes are just slow that way. Jaffer led with bravado, proclaiming his simon-purity in the matter of peddling influence; moved to bathos when he choked out a little well-timed contrition toward his wife, ex-minister Helena Guergis; then changed it up to bafflegab in cross-examination, to blow smoke over his (many) inconsistencies. He seemed convinced it would work, even after Tory MP Tom Lukiwski passed copious photocopies all 'round to contradict what Jaffer had said.

I finally got the plot when I realized that Jaffer copped his script straight from his parliamentary days. Tories use the bravado/bathos/bafflegab gag in every duel in Question Period. Come out firing, briefly tug the constituents' heartstrings, then bellow any arrant nonsense that unsubtly ignores the actual question. Admit no fault, however self-evident. (Preferably wearing a snarky sneer - for manifold examples, I cite the face beneath John Baird's hair. I digress.)

It seems to work - for governments. That, say, think they have the power to sit on document trails that show who knew what, about Afghan prisoners being tortured. I digress again. Sadly, this time...

Regular schmoes are not so lucky. Jaffer ain't plugged into government anymore, despite his alleged illusions to the contrary. With less hubris he might've noted the prime minister missed no opportunity to label him a private citizen. And he coulda guessed that if Mr Harper could blackball former PM Brian Mulroney - party luminary such as he is - then a problem partyguy from Edmonton-Strathcona would barely rate.

I'd say Harper lives in secret fear of taint. Yeah, he's a coldly calculating stinker who seems indifferent to what others think of him. But any hint of potential irony around a narrowly-defined sort of government corruption gives him the cold willies. He squeaked out a couple of elections by promising to end all that. So if some of his ministers tolerated an alleged illegal lobbyist who used to be one of 'em, without ratting him out in the fashion the PM hisself ordered, it would look, ummm... bad.

The real irony is that it was an impossible promise. The PM has gotta think that even with his stranglehold on his caucus, it's only a matter of time until one of 'em screws up. Coulda happened already. Inevitable human nature will kneecap him right where he staked out his only moral high ground. Sometime, his bus will come. Bummer about that squeaky-clean legacy...

All I'm gonna say about that...

... what with a comprehensive comment thread over on XUP's blog, would be to thank Aggie fulsomely for a stunningly appropriate binder clip. You rock, ma'am! As ever.

A Taliban bobsled team?

The Independent Observer and me wuz debriefing the other night, after the Games That Must Not be Named©®™, when one of us started asking dumb, semimythical questions about a suspiciously illogical link between sporting performance and national pride.

I'm not saying our Prime Minister ascribes to this dubious philosophy. But only because it seems kind of obvious already from the quality of his recent public electioneering ummm, pronouncements on the topic. That and his disturbing recent penchant for athlete-glomming photo-ops. I digress.

Anyway, some people seemed to place an awful lot of emphasis on a warlike beating of chests and thumping of rivals' noses into the snow. Almost as if they saw the games as a must-win-at-all-costs surrogate for military endeavour. Kinda like, say, certain failed former East European SSRs now known to have indulged in the odd steroidal binge during the Cold War.

But maybe this kinda stuff ain't much of a skate from the original Olympic ideal (Oops. Damn! Named 'em...). I mean, very early games may well have been set up to give warring Greek city-states a more wholesome outlet for their rivalries than, ummm, epic bloodshed.

So it occurred to us that maybe we could institute world peace if we just invited everybody to the games. Why couldn't everybody just get along? Maybe the Taliban are just cranky because they never get invited to play! And wouldn't it be cool to see a Taliban bobsled team instead of a Taliban insurgency?

Especially the part where they plant improvised trackside bombs to blow up rival bobsleds...

Let the real games begin...

If you just immigrated from a cannibal galaxy to pose as an earthling, I'll give you a big hand and tell you that today marks the beginning of The Games That Must Not Be Named.©®™*

Only yesterday I was telling the Independent Observer how torn I felt. I can, and do, admire the single-minded focus and dedication of athletes that train for years to compete. And their overarching efforts in the sporting events themselves.

But the arguably corrupt organization of entitled minor ex-aristocrats behind them, and the overburden of corporate sponsors jostling to noodge as much reflected glory as possible away from these athletes? Not so much.

And the blank-eyed Prime Minister with the Fiberglas©®™ hair who plans a big post-prorogue poll bounce in the happily-ever-after of Canadian athletes (completely unconnected with himself) winning a buncha bent gold gongs, not at all.

So it is with a song on my lips and a smile in my heart that I open the ESI Olympic Non-Specific Scandal watch. Things are interesting already. We have the usual 30-odd garden-variety doping bans (not us, so far, eh?) meted out before that big flame even fired up. Performance-enhancing drugs are so 90s. Everybody does 'em. Can we just ignore that aspect and move on? Please? They're an inconvenient distraction. Not at all what we meant by Citius, Altius, Fortius. At least not originally...

But just out of the starting gate, we also have a wild Canadian accusation that the German luge team is using magnets in its sleds. Somehow.

Rapidly followed by official denials all 'round, from the Germans and the sport's international sanctioning body.

As a semimythical coyote of wily but small brain, I'm totally unclear on any, ummm, actual science-y thingies involved. So, apparently, were the accusers. But, hey, that didn't stop the story from bucketing out of the starting gate faster than sledders themselves.

There has been speculation in some parts that this is part of a psychological campaign to strike fear into the hearts of our sledding opposition and unbalance their sang-froid. Unfortunately, they ain't the ones lookin' unbalanced at the moment. Obviously, the PM excepted, Canadians are so amateur at this mind-game stuff. Must do better! Or as we coyotes always say, citius, altius, fortius...!

* Unless You're A Shill An Official Sponsor Whose International Corporation Has Paid A Whack Of Blackmail Money To The Private Club of Crepuscular Old Men Who Run The Franchise As A Personal Fiefdom

Ottawa's new coyote strategy

Dawg. Here we go again. Now, city councillor Diane Deans has jumped in with her ideas about this.

A close reading of the press, though, shows that she has overlooked the obvious: I suggest it should involve giving me lotsa chocolate. Preferably high quality, and dark.

That is all.

Love means not ever having to say you're sorry you wrote Love Story

The New York Times announced this morning that Love Story author Erich Segal has died.

Some of the younger among you won't remember this (extremely) slim bestseller. That is good.

Just take it as a salutary warning that when the inevitable weepy movie appeared in 1970, the world was blessed with Ryan O'Neal and Ali McGraw as nanosecond superstars.

And that, back in the day, Love Story and Jonathon Livingston Seagull almost completely defined the philosophical thought of a, ummm, certain generation.

All of which may explain why many things so often screech sideways, now that this ummm, generation is runnin' things. I'm just sayin'...

Yawn. Lessee here....

A coyote assassination contest, you say? With shotguns as prizes? Provided you present evidence confirming your murderous success?

Obviously, Ottawa Councillor "Rabid" Doug Thompson is betting this will be a winning civic election issue in his ward again this fall...

I wonder if he wants heads? Or tails? Nyuk nyuk.

Image: Freeclipartnow.com

Tracking the mint's missing gold

I happened by Mister Sloppy's place yesterday - okay, he happens to have air conditioning - and by way of breaking his grumpy Evil-Genius silence, mentioned the Mint's vanishing gold problem, and how the local Petfinder was just yesterday obsessing again about the strange silence of government, mint and red coated gendarme types.

Mister Sloppy snickered. My usually cast-iron coyote tummy clenched. That laugh is never good.

"Slop," I said, fearing the worst. "In your obsessive quest for world domination, you haven't sucked 15 million bucks' worth of gold into an improbability vortex? Or something?"

"I didn't need to," he cackled.

"Huh?" I can be a dimwitted doggy. Especially when it helps me enjoy nice cold air conditioning a bit longer.

"You know how the Tories - having such terrific heads for business - are all hot on selling off prime government assets at fire sale prices? To allegedly balance the government's books, even though it always loses major money?

"I was rummaging around a government network one night a coupla years back and sniffed out the fact that their brain trust had decided to flog the mint's extra gold inventory in secret. To - get this - one of those "We buy all of your used gold - no amount too large or too small" joints that advertise on late night cable channels. I hacked myself into a few emails as a discussion option, and incorporated myself as a cheap gold buyer the next day. Bought a few ads in throw-away tabloids and on cable to look legit. Hung out. Waited. The government showed up in no time!"

"Aaand?" I breathed.

"I drew up a contract they couldn't make head or tails of. Not that they ever make head or tails of anything," he snorted. "When the dust cleared, I had signatures on an airtight document assigning me fifteen million bucks in gold ingots and assorted refining scrap, purchased for the princely sum of thirty-seven dollars and fifty-two cents. Which, by the way, is actually about what most old gold places would have paid 'em. A buncha the backroom guys from the PMO are now so redfaced, all they wanna do is drop the whole story down a mine in Sudbury."

"Now, if you'll excuse me, I gotta pack." Mister Sloppy looked dreamy. "Maybe Switzerland. The ice cream in Zurich is fabulous this time of year."

"So you're taking a well-deserved break from planning world domination?" I said, hopefully. I've had enough Pepto-Bismol moments lately already, with Mayor Larry back.

Mister Sloppy cast an austere blue eye at me. "Of course not! The Large Hadron Collider is there, too..."

Tinfoil hats: a gut wrenching exposé

As avid, nay, militant exponents and proponents of tinfoil hats, especially in dire emergencies, we Irregulars have just gotten extremely distressing news:

Namely, that a buncha bright engineers from M.I.T. seem to have discovered that tinfoil hats do not protect your brain from zombifying, soul-sucking government and/or alien mind-control radio frequencies, but instead amplify them! (See the terrifying conclusion.)

Wait! This means that all this time when we thought we were laughin', and thought you were too - because you put on your tinfoil hat when we told you to, right? - all of us were actually under the influence of sub rosa mind-control rays, making us beleive things that were untrue. Evilly fostering, for instance, the illusion that our tinfoil hats were protecting us. And under that illusion, we were actually.... oh. Oh. Dear, dear me!

The very insidiousness of it all boggles one's (controlled) mind! Especially if one trusts engineers!

That we're all doomed over here, goes without saying . But hey. If we all just put on our soothing, comfy tinfoil hats, we'll never notice...

Bring on the holy tacos

Yeah, yeah. I know Michael Jackson posts are already about passé. But I've been busy. And even at 3,500 feet, where the air is rare, the horizon blessedly wide, nightly howl-ups with my coyote brethren loud and yappy, and the Internet is dial-up and crappy, the King of Pop's sad death did not escape my notice.

Neither I'm sure, will the ensuing tawdry burlesque. It is, after all, one of the Independent Observer's favourite states for a reason.

Jackson's life was pure tabloid: a slow-motion circus train wreck. How would his dying change things? Especially with Joe Jackson, the ever-classy Rev. Al Sharpton, a cawing murder of publicity-hungry lawyers, the odd cellphone-camera totin' ambulance attendant, carpet-bombing Fox News 'reporters' and hordes of opportunistic alleged insiders, all gyrating out of the worm-riddled woodwork.

I'm not cynical or anything. Ummm, okay, maybe a little... I digress. But I figure we have only nanoseconds - maybe less - before the end game.

Which, if I read the signs aright, will be sightings of Jackson and Elvis, still alive. Eternally cruising the American heartland together in a white '68 Cadillac, leaving humongous tips with awestruck night shift attendants in isolated Seven Eleven gas stops. Who will sell their amazing stories to tabloid TV.

After that, it's a short inevitable hop to tales of corn tortillas adorned with the King of Pop's likeness. Blessed with miraculous powers. Oh, and steep admissions for supplicants that wish to bathe in their curative aura. Later to be hawked on eBay for thousands of bucks, and displayed in a highly legitimate casino museum on Sunset Strip.

Which reminds me. My breakfast Fritos this morning? I chanced upon this amazing silhouette of Michael Jackson on one of the chips. Hallelujah! I'm pretty sure it cured me. Of cynicism. Oh, yes. It's a freakin' - and I use that term advisedly - miracle! Bidders...?

Of big swinging appendages *

Our on-hiatus for legal reasons mayor has a pottymouth problem. Among others, since his fascination with the felicitous phrase, "big swinging dick contest", entered the court record this week past on a lo-def police interrogation video. (Hey - who doesn't look guilty on those...? But with no corroborating evidence, he could safely deny the whole rat fuck thing. This was right there in grainy black and white.)

Citizen editorial writer Kate Heartfield - one of the good guys at that eroding edifice - has smartly and thoroughly whacked the language's psychology with a post-modern feminist yardstick, in print and on air. I think that covers it completely, except for small additional light the phrase may cast on O'Brien's record. Ummm, in office.

It's not as if we didn't suspect that he regards his political day - or in the case of the Transpo strike, most of a financial quarter - as an endless series of big dick swinging contests. Supporting evidence for this inference is rich.

Maybe the mayor enters such duels because he honestly thinks his is bigger than everybody else's. Why would he believe this? Possibly because he lucked out in business and has a lotta money. Maybe because he only hires assistants that reinforce his own perceptions. Perhaps because he has temper in private and has demonstrably whirled through a veritable spin cycle of revolving-door staffers.

Doesn't matter. Unfortunately for Ottawa, this view was probably never grounded in reality. Also unfortunately, Mayor Larry is a guy who for some time has been enthusiastically dick-swinging his way straight into The Peter Principle. Problem is, he's so pathologically - and unjustifiably - self confident, he'll never know it. Sorry to keep going on like this. Honestly, I was tired of him before he was elected.

* Just so you know, the photo is named that way because original graphic concept for this post did not make it past certain members of the ESI Ethics Committee. (It also grossed out Woodsy, which takes some doing. I'm kinda proud of that.) And no, it was not what you were thinking just now... and neither is this one. It's a perfectly innocent tee-shirt graphic, for cripe's sake. Purell® your minds, people! We run a squeaky clean metablog here!

May Day: The trial(s) of Mayor Larry

As a city pauses to either smell the scent of spring, or (depending on your kink) possibly the mayor, His Nibs will step down (temporarily, he truly believes...) at midnight tonight to deal with that pesky criminal matter pending before the courts. And I just wanna say that it is so unfortunate that others - you uninformed critics and naysayers! - cannot see him in the same optimistic light that he does. Because despite the repeated intrusion of actual, you know, reality, time after time he somehow manages to keep right on believin' in the essential rightness, goodness and smartness of Mayor Larry, to a point that some may call ummm, delusional. In this spirit, it seems like a good moment to pause and recall some of our favourite Larryisms:

• "Zero means Zero!" - Campaign promise to cut city taxes. And, umm, how did that go? Now an eponymous blog pointing out Our Beloved Leader's piddling, minor, utterly forgivable oopsies...
• " "I fell asleep on my boat in July drinking a beer and when I woke up I was the mayor of Ottawa." - That's okay, fella. At least a third of Ottawa voters seem to have been blacked out that entire time, too...
• "Quite frankly I believe with every fibre of my being that I'm innocent." - Right, gotcha. See intro, above... And after consulting (barely) overnight with an unspecified focus group whose opinions seemed to fly in the face of popular majority opinion, he said "overwhelming support" led him to cling to the job instead of bowing out after being charged...
• "I feel like a rock star!" - To media at Ontario Provincial Police HQ, where he was formally charged and printed, in:re that aforementioned pesky criminal matter...
• There is, naturally, no fifth quote...
• "No comment..." - The Mayor's hired spokes-thingy, after three companies that had been signed to build a light rail system slapped the city with $277 million worth of lawsuits. His Nibs had previously persuaded council that it could tear up the contract without major consequences...
• "Certainly I'd vote for myself..." - Larry announcing his intention to continue screwing up royally ummm, run for mayor again, in 2010 municipal elections. Maybe he went back to the same focus group he used to decide to stay in office, after he was charged in that aforementioned pesky criminal matter...?

Y'know, looking back over these quotes, I'm beginning to see that Hizzoner is in way over his custom-buffed head. Alone they might mean nothing, but there's obviously a pattern of half-recognized denial. Together, they form a highly public cry for help. Mayday, indeed...

Stunned?

Many of you know that we of the Elgin Street Irregulars are big on lists of, ummm, five. If you don't, read our archives. You'll figure it out.

Some may also recall that I take a dimwitted quadruped's dim view of high voltage electrical discharges applied to living creatures. Especially since the Vancouver death of Robert Dziekanski after he was tasered - five times, it turns out - in October 2007.

With a full-on enquiry into the man's death, Taser International, cops in general and the RCMP in particular all seem to be heavily vested in denying that Tasers, police, Dziekanski and deadness are in any way linked. These may be honestly held opinions.

But I admit that my first uncharitable thought, when I heard about the Alzheimer's-like testimonial trend at the inquiry was, "Yeah, right. Stonewall away, guys...." Because, I reasoned, these talking points may also exist because if any of 'em did hint at regrettable liability, there could be legal and financial hell to pay, in Vancouver and elsewhere.

But faced with RCMP Commissioner Bill Elliot's plea for the public to walk a mile in his police force's spit-polished boots before rushing to judgement, I am now wondering about the real victims here. Could it be that the guys behind those electric stun guns really are victims, and worse off than Dziekanski?

Because after standing nearby while one of them pulled the trigger - did I mention, five times? - all of the Mounties present seem to have suffered catastrophic memory loss about the event. I don't wish to be uncharitable and suggest that they made their original statements under the mistaken assumption that no bystander had video-recorded the entire incident. Which would now place them in a position of having to explain why their statements and that video seem to part ways on several, ummm, crucial points...

No, we coyotes will take the high (voltage) road, and a charitable view of such memory loss. Obviously, the poor sunsabitches' neurons were fried by the weapon's electrical fallout. One weeps! To think of all the incidents in which police will be medically unable to remember why they zapped anybody! We could lose respect for the Mounties. And the legal system would surely descend into chaos...

Unfit to print...?

We coyotes like news papers. Probably due to puppyhood training, about which the less said in polite company, the better. So when the vivacious Jo S. began a thread on the health of the media, many, including your faithful/unreliable reporter/narrator, had things to say. I had a lot. You may safely surmise that I have not finished sucking my paws and, ummm, pawndering. And I'm not the only one. Just the only coyote...

Current world economic woes are not themselves killing newspapers and legacy electronic media. They've exposed pre-existing rot. Newspapers were a disruptive technology for their time, an artifact of (mostly) the 19th century, freshened for the 20th by the advent of giant, costly, high-speed presses. These allowed papers to meet radio, then TV, pretty much head-on, even as pundits forecast the end of hard copy.

But papers' attempts to compete with later media on their (newer) terms have lost subtle ground with each new disruption, and the Net changes the game totally. In developed societies, it's faster, more accessible and scalable than its ancestors, and cheaper for content makers. The computers we pay for download many of their distribution costs - legacy media need printing presses, delivery trucks, transmitters - right onto our desks.

And the Net's tuned to the ADD nanosecond. Why write, edit, publish and distribute articles about Paris' latest deep thinkage or Britney's wardrobe malfunctions when they can be fully, ummm, exposed in 140-character Tweets? The Craigslists and Kijijis efficiently nabbed the papers' classified lifeblood from under publishers' noses. Topping it all, media outlets began more than a decade ago to throw up content on the Net - often badly, always for free - hoping to somehow gain beachheads there until they somehow figured out how to make a buck from it. They never really did.

Newspaper presses used to pretty much print money for their owners. The Thomsons, Blacks and Aspers of Canada, and the Hearsts and Knights and Murdochs of the world, got into the business because profits were so amazingly fat. But rather than improving the product when faced with competition or adversity, they too often acted to protect profit margins with chiselling economies that made newspapers less enjoyable and more irrelevant. And unhealthy.

Oh, the Petfinder's former editor in chief tried to regain hip cred by hanging major news stories on movie and comic book leads - complete with movie publicity stills instead of, like, actual news photos. Maybe he could have thought the other way around, instead of trivializing his content. Now the paper's latest owner, Canwest-Global, tries to economize by half-gutting local newsrooms to centralize its newspaper chain's content, inappropriately like the network feed for its TV stations.

These band aids and others do not play to the strength of a good paper, which is to reflect and record local thoughts and events and people. Placing them well within in their larger regional, national and global contexts, yes, but with the aim of really good local coverage. People trying to understand themselves, and their place in the world, are constant. I think.

I'm not saying that that newspapers need to be all serious. There's plenty of room for playful print. But there should be room for context and analysis too. And maybe they could back off a little from brain-dead takes on LiLo and Amy W. That's what the Net is for.