Try to occupy *this*

Most mainstream news media (and current perversions thereof... but dear me, I digress...) can't seem to wrap their collective consciousness around Occupy Wall Street and its offshoots.

As OWS went globally local this past weekend, they're finally trying to get to it — but news TV's hair and teeth types continue to deride and whinge over what they see as Occupy's deal breaker: no focused definition, agenda, leader or spokesperson.

Thing is, media and other big-organization complaints are more about fossilized reporting conventions than Occupy's relevance.

See, sometime mid-late last century, many media honchos and theorist types actually fretted about balancing news coverage (so quaint!) in the screaming dive toward daily deadlines. The only way they saw to do that real fast was to pigeonhole every story into a prefab template. One US network news president famously wanted to stereotype every item as a black hat/white hat Old West shootout. Somewhat more thoughtful types — well, okay, media theorists* — felt you might run to maybe a half-dozen prefabs. Still amounts to fillin' blanks with dates, names, a few telling details. Voila! News story! Like any sausage machine, it works adequately as long as you don't get all hung up on finesse.

But to get names and telling details in nanoseconds, which is all anybody on a 24 hour news cycle budgets for anymore, ya gotta have easily-contacted traditional organizations with official spokesthingies, cued to bark out bullet-point "positions" in predigested clips.

It's why many news items are tiny, dumb cartoons. It's also why many are spun to hell by the groups that can pour money into blendering up self-serving bullet points like so much liquid pig shit tasty frozen martinis and firehosing 'em at reporters.

So, the major objectors to Occupy Wall Street's style: people in news who want fast chicken nuggets to slot into a standard story; and people and groups holding some traditional form of power, who seek potshot targets with which to neutralize — or better yet, blacken and bury — a movement and retake what they see as the agenda. To occupy Occupy, as it were.

I'm pretty sure that OWS' amorphous squishiness is as frustrating to old media as its very tangible if unfocused discontent is to business-as-usual forms of power. This rabble ain't so easily cartooned or contained, when you can't find rabble-rousers or messages to pinpoint bomb. Could explain why Occupiers are covering their own revolution rather well in diffuse outlets like Flickr, Twitter, Facebook anonanon. Unhindered by convention, they get it. Anti-antisocial media at its best!

Coyote News, though we sometimes fly with the turkey vultures, is cool with it. Because it really, really pisses off political types desperately seeking some easy in, to either smear or co-opt the whole thing. And our embarrassing, illegitimate cousins at Fox and Sun, ummm, News. Did we mention them? Kinda flailing at the whole discrediting thing. Snicker...

* You, my doggybloggy reader, are of course so interested in this stuff that you will read further, maybe something like Making News (Gaye Tuchman); Deciding What's News (Theodore Gans), or Discovering the News (Michael Schudson). Because you're not the type to take your entire daily news/info/bloggossity hit on a smartphone in that two-minute lineup for your latte. You're better than the mere latte-rati...

Maman walks The Line

You have no doubt heard news of the National Gallery's new acquisition, One Hundred Foot Line, planted of late on the foothills of Nepean Point.

I understand that, nominally, it represents a bare, limbless tree. With the right lighting (read: "brooding and dramatic") it's pretty spectacular. It is a tall pointy metal stick to be reckoned with, but not for wimpy, mild cirrus-cloud summer days. Yet I was also kinda jealous when the guys over at OttawaStart.com came up with the line: "A huge monument to sticking your tongue to a cold pole."

The other day, after each of us had wandered down serially to look up (waaaaaay up...) at it, Robin K. from Watawa Life and me had a lengthy philosophical discussion about the phenomenological and epistemological implications of really humongous public art.

Long story short, Robin said he still far preferred Maman, out front. He's cooler on stainless steel toothpicks. Or in his words, "Who wouldn't like a statue of a giant spider?"

About then, some semimythical idiot piped up thoughtlessly, "...but has no one considered how cool it would look if Maman was climbing that steel tree? Epic, in a King Kong on the Empire State Building kinda way! But more spidery and metallic…!"

It was at that fateful point that Robin fatefully uttered the fateful words: "Agreed! Send her up."

Genius.

"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'...

Summer's end

Some weird summer, huh? I fell asleep on my boat in July drinking a beer, and when I woke up I was the mayor of Ottawa!

Oh, wait. Coyotes don't got boats. Or beers. So either I'm still snoozing and dreaming, or regretfully and regrettably channeling some other rather unreliable narrator...

Dear me. I seem to digress earlier and earlier in these little screeds. This time I derailed before I even nailed down a theme, which should have been something along the lines of, "We semi-mythical trickster types are mostly optimistic souls, happily anticipating our next LOLs." I mean, we always keep an eye open for rainbows. (Especially ones made of bacon. If you see one, lemme know care of this blog...) But some of the doings in this country in the past few months have left us feeling decidedly waterbowl-half-empty. -Ish.

However ya slice it, I've been left to ponder the murkier, bacon-challenged, recesses of the canine soul.

Now that we've steamed through the Labour Day Weekend, a municipal election looms, and that other unreliable narrator is busily re-spinning his sorry-ass mayoral record to make it resemble something a touch less disastrous.

And rumours of a federal election, as always, flit about like, well, rumours in Ottawa. To decide whether one will actually happen, you'd have to look into the mind of the PM. Just try not to look too long or deeply. It's icky. But he can pull the imperial prorogue gag only once or twice before the electorate gags, so we may be safe for a bit, yet.

The problem as I see it is that no politician at the moment seems capable of lighting the kind of fire that gets people enthusiastic and behind the cause. Any cause. There seem to be no causes except narrow minded, partisan jockeying for position. Meanwhile, political offices at all levels are begging for candidates with, oh, actual charisma, intelligence and ideas that embody an authentic zeitgeist, ethos or what-have-you.

Oh, us coyotes will probably watch - and yowl - anyway. We always do. But more and more, all we're really hoping for is to hang on for the appearance of the actual bacon - some kinda inspiration that we can buy into. Meantime, we're resigned to a long, nasty, ill-defined lumpy-cream-of-wheat kinda autumn...

Honestly...

I hate rainy days. And we coyotes find that honesty as defined by our elected representatives is a strange thing indeed.

Current events suggest that the current Prime Minister practices a form of petty-cash honesty - scrupulous about accounting for pennies, nickel(back)s and dimes, in ways that firmly address the letter of election promises to bring accountability back to government, but that are infinitely greasier on larger matters of ethics. Petty-cash honesty can be way to feel virtuous while more problematic pathologies of the soul need addressing.

A recently gauche minister was turfed because she is accused - but not proven - of applying her publicly-elected mitts to encourage a little private gain in the family. It's close enough to the kind of thing that helped the PCs deep-six Liberals and gain power, that the PM calculated that he had to cut her loose, or look even more like a cynical hair-splitter than he already does. Yet, nickel and dime stuff in the end.

In Ottawa's political bubbleworld, most big-picture statements made during elections seem to be covered by a blanket equivalent of crossed fingers behind the back. Politicians who spout 'em, believe them only as far as they need to to sell the message. Once asses are snuggled into seats in the House, neither they, nor any the other gamesters sitting across the aisle, expect to be held to such promises.

Cynical as hell, yeah, but it certainly helps a poor dumb canine to understand why a government elected on broad promises of openness and accountability can merrily strangle both, while the PMO's chief of staff mouths black-is-white platitudes about the great job it's doing on the file.

And the question of whether Cabinet, or ministers, condoned or encouraged the torture of human beings in Afghanistan, was dismissed with the suggestion that Canadians don't care about it. "Canadians" in this case probably means the Conservative's core voters. Problematically, I am left to conclude that the party's definition of "human beings" may mean the same exclusive group.

So even if the nickels and dimes in petty cash add up so far, it doesn't follow that a government is intellectually honest - or ethical.

And thinking about it, I kinda wonder if maybe the current government has as much problem with the "intellectual" part as it does with honesty. Shudder. We coyotes would do well to save that one for an entirely different rainy day, I think...

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...

Nature speaks to PM on climate change?

Last night, we coyotes hunkered down in our La-Z-Dogs to TV news reports of a big-mother blizzard in our old stomping grounds.

Soon after, a semimythical puppyhood friend with whom I used to tear up the occasional poultry coop - just youthful hijinks, y'understand - sent along this shot from the local Doppler, saying, "If a random image of Jesus on a pizza can awe and inspire people, I figure a death's head can appear on weather radar by the same token. The prognosis is for blizzard conditions later tonight. But I'd have called this a blizzard 4 hours ago. Spooky."

The accompanying legend doesn't make it look like much snow, but keep in mind that this was just the buildup. And that it is in the nature of the place that, inevitably, a helluva wind came with it.

Being who we are, and of a semimythical, partly-animistic bent, we couldn't help but wonder, what with the Copenhagen world conference looming, if maybe, maybe, Ma Nature was sending a big-mother memo to id(iot)eologically-blind PMs with southwest Calgary ridings? Who think climate change is a 'socialist plot'....? Say, about fatally-misguided policies that support stripmining the Alberta tarsands, and damn all ecological consequences for living creatures?

Because, well, the death's head is centered directly over those particular PM's southwest Calgary ridings. I'm just sayin'.

Down to...

This morning, the ol' inbox washed up a veritable tsunami of friends, well wishers and ummm, others, pointedly informing me of the Petfinder's latest screed about the Zero Means Zero blog

I have no idea why...

Zero Means Zero is apparently written by an administration insider, and as such has been a thorn in Mayor Larry's side almost since the moment he strutted into City Hall. It's scathing, mean-spirited and entertaining. It's been a bit tiresome recently, but still packs a nifty assortment of pointed words. And it has often publicly asked the questions that some of us were thinking privately. That it has also (somehow) remained anonymous all of this time seems to piss off the Larry partisans all the more.

I realize I may attract all manner of hurled debris toward Casa Coyote's infamously glassy walls when I ask this, but... the person(s) responsible for sending the lawyers after Zero by trying to force Google to reveal (his/her/its/their) identity? You noticed that they wanna be anonymous, right?

Oh, the irony. Or, ummm, possibly the paradox. Maybe the sarcasm. Er, the satire...? The oxymoron...? Crap! I dunno! Much like Alanis Morissette, we coyotes are frequently iffy on literary nuances. But doesn't it seem kinda goofy...?

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...?

Getting a handle on economic disaster

This week, StatsCan jobless figures and the parliamentary budget officer's new economic report suggest that we're even more totally screwed, despite the prime minister's consistently cheery "don't worry be happy" mantra. Imagine that.

So, previous stellar efforts of our own Audrey and Fourth Dwarf notwithstanding, obviously it is time again for the ESIs to step into the economy. Yuck! It's all over my paws now, and it smells, like, ummm, bad! I digress.

At the ESI Institute for Tax-Deductible Thinktankage, we are all over putting a face on the true extent of this economic mess, with our specialty, the all-important nomenclature. For now, we'll leave the actual fixing-up stuff to trained economists like the PM. Who unfortunately has never actually worked as an economist. Oops.

Now where was I? Oh, right: Economy. Doom. Disaster. Etymology.* Terminology. Coinage.

"Ecopalypse" had the nicest ring, but a quick paw-over of Google shows those freakin' pesky environmentalists have already tagged it. Bastards. And why is it that their cosmic antimatter, all those smart develop-at-any-cost business types, still haven't noticed that economy and ecology look, even to a casual observer, to be so closely related? Not a coincidence, surely. I digress again.

"Econalypse" made our fallback list, but it turns out some lousy blogger beat us to it by months. Bastard. Besides, it sounds too much like "Econo-Lips". Which in turn sounds too much like the kind of big, red wax lips that Stephen Harper would buy at a dollar store, and wear to lighten up those hinterland news conferences where he keeps insisting that the country's economic fundamentals are great. That kidder.

Then, in homage to the epic Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme that finally overbalanced the global economy's already-sideways tilt, we thought "Eponzilypse". We were really graspin' at straws on that one...

Crap! We need ideas. What to do, what to do? I know! How 'bout a contest...?

* Memo to Traci, perky but inexperienced new summer intern in the ESI graphics department: Kid, etymology is about words. Entomology is about bugs. Take a note for next time, please...

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.

It's a Hoot

A few years ago, when Hooters first came to Ottawa, I thought it would be entertaining to see what all the fuss was about.

A male companion and I sat down at a table, and after a long wait a cute blond waitress skipped over to us. I admired her fit body clad in tiny tight sports shorts (the kind I had worn when I was sixteen) and her tight little wife beater t-shirt with the trademark protruding owl eyes design. She placed both elbows on the table, leaned over and cleverly aimed her tits at us.

"And what can I bring you folks today," she giggled smacking her gum.

She took our order and as she wiggled off I looked at my companion curious about his reaction.

"It's all just an act you know. She's a university student trying to earn an honest living," he stuttered as I noticed the deep blush on his face.

The feeling of dreams

We millenia-old semi-mythical dog types spend a lot of time weaving through dreams, the subconscious and the unconscious. It's in the job description. So, when, a couple of days ago, Japanese scientists announced that they'd taken tentative steps to 'read' images in people's brains and display them, I raised an eyebrow. The mechanics involve a lot of big expensive, cool science-y stuff, described in science-y language, but there's a slightly simpler translation here.

The commentary I've seen so far is along the lines of "Cool! In ten years I can show my friends my dreams! In Technicolor®™!"

Does anybody else feel alarmed?

Until now, we coyotes assumed that our thoughts and dreams were very private things, unless we ourselves chose to describe them to somebody else. Considering some of the things I've thought, that's a comfort. Because the idea that others might see them leads my thoughts down a very dark Orwellian alley. Coyote's 116th Law states if such a tool exists, somebody, somewhere, will find a way to misuse it, probably in the name of something like, oh, homeland security. The corollary to Coyote's 116th Law is that such equipment will eventually be consumerized, be manufactured in quantity and then fall into the hands of officious masses of un- or under-trained idiots who think they know what they're doing, simply because they're packing the gear and had a half-day workshop. Think airport security screeners. Or Tasers.

You may also be thinking that the paranoid doggy dreams of imaginary monsters under his bed, but that leads to my point. My dreams are mine, and you very probably can't understand them unless you are me. I don't know what you dream, of a night, when your paws scrabble as if you're chasing bunnies across a pristine prairie, but I'm not convinced that somebody else peeking in on the complicated swirl of oddly dis/un/connected images that is a dream is gonna interpret it with any reliability. I have trouble articulating it because of the nature of dreams themselves, but I suspect that they are far more about individual background, context and feeling than about a fragmentary movie playing on a voyeur's monitor. Without the associated feelings the movie is really out of focus. I also suspect that any equipment freak who thinks he can parse 'em in anything other than the crudest way can dream on. In Technicolor®™.

More Reminiscences for Things in the Past

Following Aggie's and the IO's reminiscences, here are some other things I miss. Although, I am aware that Thomas Wolfe's statement, "you can't go home again," mostly holds true here:

1. Doing my undergrad degree -- all those optional attendance classes. The beauty of all the young, hopeful and enthusiastic people around me. Those earnest and confident discussions. The larger societal acceptance. Never having to be anywhere before 11:30 a.m. The 15-hour a week "full time!" school load. Whipping off mediocre term papers and cramming. Being high.

2. Travelling before cellphones and email existed. The emotional freedom of movement.

3. A time when I told myself that earning money, necessary yet trivial, was something I would do in my future.

4. A time when I didn't worry about my or our future.

5. No fifth thing, but a note to the Chair: I'm a day late. Chair, feel welcome to post.