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.

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.

The lie of the land

Memo to Defence Minister Peter MacKay RE: Afghan torture

Sirrah:
You're still a wanker. But it appears that you're evolving into a more morally reprehensible one.

It pains nobody more than us to admit that, when you assert that you know nothing, you are not actually telling the truth. Because we'd really like to believe it. And god knows, you and your colleagues in the current caucus pretty much demonstrate, often and with vigour, that you truly do know nothing most of the time.

Unfortunately, in the matter of what you, personally, knew about the army handing Afghan detainees over for torture, as with many other assertions of moral superiority that your government has made in the past year or two, the fat is in the fire. The cat is out of the bag. The jig is up.

For future reference, ya might want to take careful notes on what I'm about to say. This definitely will be on the exam. Soon, I hope:

For politicians such as yourself - that is, a guy who lied his face off to get himself elected head of the former Conservative party, so he could hand it over to his current NeoCon lord and master to co-opt - plausible denial only really ever works, and usually only a teensy bit even then, when it's, ummm, plausible.

Plausibility vanishes whenever you open your mouth. Is that clear enough? Even for you?

Because at the moment, you're only twistin' in the wind, feeding extra oxygen to the kinds of flames that, sooner or later, will fry even those banned Quebec asbestos underpants that you guys persist in trying to flog to the Third World...

Turn, turn, turn

Dimwitted coyote I may be, but there's nothing wrong with my efficiently pointy snout. Lately, the whiffy scent near this burg's sundry halls of power has smelled powerfully like, well, crap.

I keep hearing politicos make these sorts of claims:

• "It's a terrific idea! It died because we didn't explain it right!
• "The public is far too dumb to understood this idea. If they really got it, they'd love it!"
• "Only a vocal minority is against us. The Silent Majority is on our side!"

Et cetera. But is it coincidence that the guy who used that Silent Majority argument most famously was an utter scoundrel...?

Actual, you know, good ideas, seem to be irrelevant. Now, the game is all spin.

Political guys in the last few decades have turned increasingly to spin doctors to help them sell their agendas. Mind numbing repetition, bad propaganda worthy only of tinpot tyrannies, slung mud, outright lies, and stifled democratic debate are all in the toolkit. Screw honest debate in a democracy! The public needs what's good for it, even if it doesn't know what that is. And spin doctors are happy to supply their dubious commodities. It brings in a very nice buck or six.

Problem seems to be that spin doctors by any other name totally drive the bus these days. And, sadly, lotsa politicians', ummm, wonderful ideas are, ummm, unsupported by facts. Or repugnant to the majority, silent and otherwise. Take your pick of recent federal sales jobs. Or city ones. Check the spin. Comfortable?

If you aren't, many politicians apparently are. Bathed in the lush suds of their own spin cycles ever more often, they don't seem to see that, pretty often, the public understands what they're on about just fine. And hates it. Spin may sway people some of the time. It does not, cannot, make shitty ideas brilliant.

The spin technique I spot most often in the public discourse of late is called, I believe, "putting lipstick on a pig". If you've ever gotten close enough to a pig to contemplate putting lipstick on it, ya have an idea of what anybody with that job smells like... and we're all downwind.

The Ottawa Glebe & Mall

Welcome to the new ESI Glebe & Mail's great grey op ed page. Another time, we'll deal with Mayor Larry's diabolical hiring of Jasmine MacDonnell, thus placing the ESIs in an ethical quandary. Right now, the Lansdowne Park issue affects us, and Ottawa, in bigger ways.

This week, Lansdowne Live's local powerhouse developer triad presented its fine-tuned plan to grab and commercialize a large and prized piece of public land in the Glebe.

Subsequent council and public debate has again highlighted the projects' flaws.

Last fall, the developers sent an unsolicited bid to city councillors and staff, claimed it to be "revenue neutral", then, in a particularly ballsy move, gave them a tight deadline to respond. The most blatant pressure tactic in the book. Administration and council bit and swallowed enthusiastically, when they should have raised a collective eyebrow, then continued with open public consultation and an open design competition.

The mayor and certain councillors proclaimed that Lansdowne Stadium was crumbling, the attached park was a blight, and we needed to do something fast. But was a "Do Anything As Long as it's Quick" strategy for Lansdowne Park the "Right Thing" for all of us? Ummm, not so much.

From Casa Coyote's jaundiced vantage point, the proposal seems to be about nabbing scads of public green space and turning it essentially private. This week's plan shows, riding on the dubious coattails of a football stadium upgrade and few sops of green space, a gigantic "commercial development" that boils down to (another damn) big-box shopping mall. Oh, and a whack of condos that council stated it didn't want in there.

The space is public, and precious. It shouldn't be only self-diagnosed movers and shakers who drive what happens there, it should be all kinds of ordinary people across the region.

Let's put aside for a moment the appropriateness of rolling the dice on (another) Canadian Football League franchise after three failures. And whether we should even give the CFL a toehold in the debate, when it has no team in town anymore. And whether, even granting the above, a stadium should be rebuilt at Lansdowne, instead of somewhere else with, say, more space for parking and better street access. Forget those picayune bits.

What I'm sayin' is, I've never met developers that didn't deeply believe that they could vastly improve green and open space by filling it up with ugly buildings that make them scads of cash. It's their mindset, and they honestly don't seem to understand any other viewpoint. But we should not be enabling their no-doubt-interesting pathologies here.

I think it gets down to the fact, that, in its haste to grab a dangled lure, council slewed away from an open, fair and transparent public development process toward an ethical shoulder. Maybe the ditch.

Lansdowne is the kind of city-changing thing you want to do right, not quick. Frankly, I don't give a rat's heinie if the proposal is nominally revenue neutral - the Lansdowne space is the kind of historic public jewel a city council should never, ever try to cheap out on. Or give away.

Just so ya know, Randall Denley of the Petfinder solidly backs the current project. And just so ya know, whenever we coyotes start thinkin' that maybe he's on the right side of an issue, we reflexively pat ourselves down to check for signs of the apocalypse. He's usually that wrong.

Tasemanian gavel

The Justice Thomas Braidwood inquiry, in a beautifully lucid, commonsense finding that should surprise no one, has ruled that Tasers can kill.

There are caveats, but coyotes who have been on about electrical discharge weapons for at least as long as Braidwood has been inquiring, feel that logic has returned to the debate. Taser International, and cops on this country who may stand to face legal and civil action as a result of their, ummm, overenthusiastic endorsement - Tasemania, if you will - of the damned things, may not.

For the first time in ages, Taser International is not ranked first in the Google results for "Taser". News about the inquiry is. That's gotta suck for sales.

In fact, right after Braidwood's news conference yesterday, Taser International's spokesthingy fired off an email slamming the inquiry's report as "politics triumphing over science".

That would be the science fully-funded by Taser and hauled into a series of courtrooms to legally muddy, squelch and steamroll the faintest scintilla of evidence that its weapon had contributed to any death, anywhere. The science Taser used to sell boxcars full of its products to police forces that have come to regard them as really safe electric people prods. The science that Taser has been regularly trotting out at conventions of police chiefs and various rentacops, to show them how their under trained rookies can be handed stun guns with which to zap drunks and, say, subway turnstile jumpers. The science that Taser has been using to impress our more, ummm, law-and-order MPs when it lobbies them...

Oh, wait! Wasn't that all politics? Oops. Some coyotes just don't know when to stop thinkin'...

No whore like an old whore *

For a guy hellbent on preserving, what he seems to believe is a, ummm, statesman's legacy and good name, former PM Brian Mulroney has quite an approach.

A brief pause to declare biases: my visceral hatred of the man and every oily thing he's done or stood for, has raged undying from the time he started smarming the backroom boys back in the antediluvian era, to this day. We keep punting the bastard out of the headlines. Still he has the nerve to keep coming back and re-offending, already! He once took voice coaching to lower his timbre and sound smoother. Still my large, sensitive ears must instinctively fold themselves shut periodically, to muffle an undertone of nails on a blackboard. Just so ya know.

My distaste stems from a sleazy style and an unidentifiable substance. I possess the clamouring sixth sense that every smirk - and he smirked a bunch, back in the day - signalled (yet another) gleeful skate to the thinnest edge of propriety. He was always more about clinching the deal - any deal - than what the hell actually came of it. Just as long as he could beat his chest in public and brag in private about being the smart guy that made it happen. And he seemed to truly love putting one over on just about anybody, then justifying it in technical terms so narrow and specious that only he and hangers-on seemed to be able to believe they were in the true spirit of the thing. It wasn't about the good of the country, or even his party, or the power. It was about putting one over on someone. Anyone.

You see where I'm going with this. Every time the guy did something, somebody got screwed. They knew they'd been screwed, and resented it. Their last sight usually was of Mulroney skating away on ice so thin it crackled, thumbing his nose over his shoulder. Eventually, most of the country felt that way. He skated off again, ducking humiliation by handing over the party to a Patsy (actually, a Kim...) so that he could say he'd always led the Tories to majorities. Technically.

Since, he has acted to save what he regards as his good name, in ways that beggar the idea of a good name. It's a world where being called Right Honourable is everything. Acting right honourably, not so much. This time he may succeed again - it's important for him to appear to be a success in others' eyes - but only in technical terms so narrow and specious as to hollow out the 'win' utterly. His performance at the inquiry on the Hill this week has been vintage: tightly scripted, smarmy, blustering, self-congratulatory, even crocodile tears. Along with gratuitous digressions that attempt yet again to rewrite history and re-shaft old enemies. Even now, he thinks he can charm the country one more time with sins of omission, half-truths and hubris. Possibly he will. Technically.

But it has been a performance. The guy wants to be liked and well thought of, and has no idea why so many hate him. Even as PM, he made a deeply flawed dramatic character: grandiose, venal, over-eager to be loved, fonder of appearances than actual substance. And pathetic. He still is. And he still deserves no sympathy.

* A curiously relevant Mulroney quote... don'cha think?

The r*tf*ck effect deconstructed

In the quasi/legal three ring circus that was Ottawa yesterday:

• A former PM rehashed and reshaded ancient (disingenuous) self-justifications for what a reasonable person might call suspect behaviour;
• There was a suspect "She said/She said" parliamentary committee hearing about an MP's personal nannygate;
• And Hizz suspect Honor's pricey legal help executed the expected surgical hatchet job on an accuser's credibility. (Hey. It is his job.);

...and I arched what passes for an eyebrow on a dog, over the symbolism of the mayor's alleged utterance to accuser Terry Kilrea at an, ummm, alleged courtesy meeting:

"We could have just ratfucked you."

It is stated that the mayor shook his head vigorously from the pews as if to deny this. The judge, if he's good as he's supposed to be, will ignore that bit of mimery for the voters as, well, mimery. And irrelevant to any legal findings. I digress.

If the statement occurred - and it's not impossible, boys often being locker-room boys - I find it disillusioning yet plausible that a person of the political persuasion might extend the courtesy of not ratfucking a single opponent, the better to do it to an entire city.

I am often cynical. And I am certainly weary. But it seems to me that the subversive common thread in each of these is a tired certainty that for far too long, many short sighted, system-gaming politicians - former, current, and wannabe - consider that playing silly partisan buggers with each other is just business as usual.

And every time they think they've scored cheap points on an opponent, what's really getting ratfucked is a country, its democratic institutions - and every member of the municipal, provincial and federal electorates. Woof.

Talk to The Hand

After one of the wilder weeks in Canadian political history, early pundications suggest the PM outmaneuvered his coalition opponents. The right-leaning ones say this makes him a freakin' genius.

Over the longer term, I'm not so sure. He needed to fuel a huge ideological shit storm to survive - on top of dropping the cynical fiscal stink bomb that started the Houseparty in the first place.

Fans of 60s cinema recall that Dr. Strangelove had an "alien hand". He claimed to be a reconstructed democrat, but The Hand was an unreconstructed Nazi bent on world destruction. Such that, whenever the doc talked about how to pull the world back from the edge of annihilation, The Hand leaped up to strangle him.

I'm starting to see a mental version of The Hand behind the PM's actions. Every time his mouth shapes even mild conciliation toward non-conservatives, this thing leaps out, gibbering, to smash the thought and sow chaos. He can't help it. It's bred in the bone. Given a choice between statesmanship and cheap shots at political opponents, his deepest instinct is to try to lull 'em just long enough to line up a better kick at their goolies. It's a strange way to build consensus - or a nation. And all the more marked for its contrast with recent events to the south of us.

I've said before that I think the guy played too many world-domination-themed board games in his geeky undergrad dorm. He can't drop the short sighted mindset of 'screw everybody to win the game'. And he surrounds himself only with like-minded gamesters.

So for him to reach across the (now padlocked) floor with conciliaTory words, after the week that was, seems even more disingenuous than blue sweater vests or platitudes about new eras of cooperation. You know, the things that preceded the tone-deafness of his infamously partisan fiscal update. His return to sweet reason seems perfunctory to the point of disinterest. I suspect that as with every preceding example we have available, he won't be bothered to fake it for any longer than he has to. In a crisis, he thinks he can outsmart anybody. Trouble is, his own lousy instincts have sparked the fuses on most of the country's recent crises.

Thing about classic movies, is that the guys who wrote them know their drama. (So do 6,000 year old, semi-mythical coyotes. We had drive-ins back west, y'know... and, it seems, longer memories and better civics lessons than much of the Canadian electorate. I digress.) The central figures in Greek and Shakespearean tragedy all have fatal flaws. Some far less obvious than the PM's metaphorical hand. I worry that this has the makings of a G(r)eek tragedy for Canada.

Pre-Posthumous Urban T**t (*) Zeitgeist Award

The observant among you will have noticed that I did not post Friday. I can explain: the dog ate my homework. Wait! I am the... oh, crap...

Actually, my reasons have to do with yesterday's state of high fuzzy-headedness. Thursday evening, whilst I was partaking of a postprandial aperitif, (often a blissful moment) the trouble began. Somewhere not unadjacent to the 'ol coyote den, a car with its antitheft alarum's sensors cranked to the max began to honk wildly at the transit of every squirrel - nay, every falling leaf. You know how many leafs are fallin' right now. It sounded like a freight train. Or a Buick.

I assumed some ass had parked and gone off to carouse on Elgin Street, and that all would be well in a few excruciating hours.

Wrong. All night, that horn fired off every five minutes. I then assumed that perhaps said ass had over-imbibed and taxied home. Still an ass, yet at least not endangering the public. But a quick stroll at eight-AM-ish Friday morning pinpointed the offending automobile - indeed a big honkin' new Buick - in a nearby residential driveway.

I contemplated this hyperactive excretion with an austere red eye. Well, two. As I did, a guy with an air of Steve Dallas about him stepped blithely from the porch with his Eddie Bean Insulated Travel Mug, Giant Squid Edition®, blipped the remote, climbed in, started up, and drove off.

I am grateful to Woodsy and Pandora for their thoughtful attempts to caffeinate my sleepless condition at a popular bean juice joint, later that day. They were well-intentioned and well-received.

Yet, maybe it's Seasonal Affective Disorder kicking in, but my ill humour remains. Steve: You are the lucky winner of coyote's Pre-Posthumous Urban T**t Zeitgeist (PPUTZ) Award. This means that I am bending my not-inconsiderable semimythical, totemic telekinetic powers to focus the universe's karma upon you. Kinda like a big psychic magnifying glass aiming the sun at your brain. Soon, your head will explode. All over your brand-new Buick's upholstery, I hope. Fair is fair.

* Toot. Twat. Take your pick...

Debatacle 2008

Two national election debates? Us and that ailing geopolitical gorilla next door? Simultaneously? The situation called for a savagely massive cable hookup, a big bowl of salty snax at one paw, and the TV remote at the other, giving me the power to cover the (in)continent's political circuses at the flick of a claw. Maybe Prozac and beta blockers to cushion my delicate psyche against the inevitable crash...

...two bags of grass, seventy five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicoloured uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a bowl of Cheezitz, and two dozen amyls. The only thing that worried me were the Cheezitz. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible than a coyote in the depths of a Cheezitz binge....*

Early on in the verbal thrust and parry, I began to realize the aptness of a rustic expression from back in Alberta, where we coyotes come from: "Slicker 'n liquid pig shit!" A reference as literal as it sounds. Warm and soft and brown as Sarah Palin's eyes, with the heady aroma of Stephen Harper's belated attempts to look like some ordinary nice guy. Suitably aged, it makes adequate fertilizer. Fresh, it renders the hair in your nose unconscious, then dissolves it.

Relief came when I found I could drown out both debates by cramming my mouth full of Cheezitz, crunching loudly, and frenetically flipping in the approved ESI fashion: channelling OCD and ADD in parallel. It was worth the unfortunate fluorescent orange fangs, just to be able to block it all out.

Problem was, after a couple of hours of high speed flipping and chewing, I began to feel a little woozy and dizzy. Maybe I dozed a little. Could've. Images streaming in from the ether north and south of the border fumed, spun and merged into a coyote's worst nightmare. Sarah still had her perky cheerleader chuckle, but her smile had become Steve's twisted grimace. Her eyes had mutated to a cold, calculating ice blue.

I may have hallucinated the lizard tongue. Or not. Whatever. Fear and loathing is alive and well in North America.

* ... with orange-fanged apologies to HST...

I'll have a non-fat chai latte, hold the cup

Waiting for Audrey recently at a downtown Starbucks, I ordered a latte.

The woman behind the counter responded in the same tone she might use had I asked her to co-pilot an imaginary spaceship to the planet Xatox or express milk my waiting llama on the sidewalk.

"You want an actual cup?" she asked.

"Yes, an actual cup would be great," I said with a smile.

I also ordered a piece of banana cake, and upon hearing the crinkle of a paper bag I chimed in, "That's for here, too."

"Oh, yes," she said, soon adding, "We only have this saucer. All the actual plates are broken."

"A saucer would be fine."

I'm not a green-tinged saint but, hey, I try.

Common sense, not to mention a study or five, tells us ceramic mugs and plates are more environmentally friendly than disposable cups and paper bags, even when you factor in the energy needed to manufacture and wash the dishes.

But invariably the chain coffee joints offer you a disposable cup rather than a reusable one.

Starbucks says it wants to "re-establish" the ceramic mug as its "global standard" for people swilling java in-store by 2010.

Let's hope the planet is still around.

Image: http://yogitimesblog.blogspot.com/

Warm Fuzzy Blues

Shortly before the latest federal election call, Canada's PM suddenly popped up in ads trying to show him up in his (ahem) best light.

Apparently I'm not the only one disturbed by the strained warm fuzzies of the infamous blue sweater vest, bringing out the warmth of his zombie-blue eyes and fetchingly setting off his Fiberglas® hair. I guess the idea was to tell us Steve is badly misunderstood, and the private man is really a charming, pinano-plunkin' family-dad type, not a robotic freak who can't smile for a TV camera without grinding his teeth to powder.

Apparently it has escaped spin doctors that Canadians are not voting for a private dad. They're voting for a public Prime Minister. This one's public performance has been that of a vindictive, over-ideological control freak who is not above the, ummm, occasional fib to gain elected office, or the occasional cheap partisan potshot once he gets there.

I'm disturbed by the contempt with which this warm fuzzy ploy holds voters. Apparently, a few weeks of stilted advertising should be enough to blot out all memories of the man's smirking yet paranoid performance in front of a minority Parliament he called 'dysfunctional' because: a) his own partisan maneuvering made it that way; and, b) it wouldn't do exactly what he wanted.

Coyotes may be fuzzy-headed - and largely missing from Elections Canada voter lists - but I don't believe democracies usually work that way for minority governments. Maybe, as cowboys from my old stomping grounds used to yell as they took potshots at me, I have shit-fer-brains. Or maybe the PM blatantly maneuvered into place for a quick potshot at a majority government before a global economic malaise, largely caused by a Neo-Con to the south that he seems to admire, starts to really mess up his electoral chances.

What baffles my fuzzy head about the PM's claims to strong leadership, is that his own tax cuts and benefits have been cosmetic pandering that - according to many economists, even conservative ones - are not good governance. What concerns me even more is the fact that top ministers in a pretty thin cabinet - Messrs Baird, Clement and Flaherty - all sat on the inner circle of Mike Harris' provincial government. You know, the one that not too long ago, about burnt Ontario to the ground on the basis of ideology. Warm fuzzies, indeed.

Urban Olympics:Bank Street Hurdles

Ottawa's looming graffiti crisis

Lately I've been reading overheated media coverage of Ottawa's graffiti problem. You know, Krylon Invasion, city councillors buying business constituents high pressure washers to zap offending spraybombage - like that. I've been ambivalent. I know a lot of it defaces private property, but we coyotes like certain graffiti. Some of it is really beautiful, and when I see it, it makes me happy. I speak of the true public artists. Taggers? Not so much. May their sooty black aerosol cans explode in their sweaty little mitts. I digress.

Saturday, though, I sprayed a mouthful of my customary breakfast (Piping hot crumpets, cat marmalade, steaming mug of fresh-brewed vitriol) all over my morning Petfinder. Patrick Curran, OC Transpo's business development manager, was floating a trial balloon about selling transit station names to the highest-bidding corporate sponsors. Some city councillors and the usual suspects on the editorial page seemed to like it.

The argument is that Transpo needs the money, and there's no more space for ads on the buses. Seems to me that maybe the city should just fund the service properly. But dreaming up billion dollar tunnels and harebrained 'innovations' is way more fun than making sure the existing bus system works well in the most basic ways.

Mr. Curran rather disingenuously notes that St. Laurent transit station already is named for the attached mall, and argues that opens the door to more of the same. Nice try at historical revisionism to support a thin-end-of-the-wedge propaganda technique, but, ummm, no. The mall is labelled for the rather prominent nearby boulevard that the mall promoters swiped its name from.

Ottawa is a town where, when a boneheaded fuckwit has a idea that shrieks out for rapid trashing, then tries to smoke it past us by self-diagnosing it as 'innovative', a buncha other boneheaded fuckwits will nod sagely and murmur, "Mmmm... innovative!" It's how decisions are made. But non-sequitur-ish corporate sponsorship isn't innovative. It's already been inflicted elsewhere. Yoohoo! Senators Coliseum? Which became the Corel Centre? An asshatted monument to momentary corporate hubris - and sanctioned graffiti, really. Now it's ScotiaBank Place...

Transit is about moving people efficiently. Renaming transit stations - all of which now (very handily) key on nearby geographical features - is not. We already let businesses deface the cityscape by smearing it with their kind of graffiti. We just call them 'logos', 'signs' and 'advertising'. Why let 'em further confuse a bus ride, too?

Let's talk Tasers

In the spirit of Full Service Blogging™, let's talk Tasers.

Apply Liberally is all over the latest round of the public, seemingly eternal Mayor Larry et-family-al trainwreck. Other pastures beckon. Apropos of which, I must declare my bias. My views may be coloured by puppyhood brushes with electric cattle fences: innocently skootching under a wire into a pasture and, ***BLAMMO*** I'm on my butt with my tail smokin' and my ears ringing. You figure out which side I take...

Most of us have seen the appalling video of Robert Dziekanski, and the national followup since last November. I keep seeing things that make me go "Whaaaaa...?". So many, in fact, that I only have time to hit this week's.

First: That while the CEO (Read: head salesman) of Taser International manages to get before a parliamentary committee in January to try to control the damage to his brand and pre-define the public debate (Roughly, "It's not a Taser-related death if the victim doesn't kick off while the probes are still glowing -- two minutes later and it ain't us, eh?") Dziekanski's mother didn't get a rebuttal until yesterday.

Second: That Vancouver transit cops have used these things as electric people prods on at least three people trying to do bunks after not paying their fares. The highest fare is, ummm, five bucks. Sadly, this is not isolated behaviour: there appear to be examples in many police services where 'boys with toys' have zapped (alleged) perps just because they have the damned things.

Third: That Ottawa City Police seem to feel that a Taser-mounted camera that starts rolling when the safety is turned off, stopping again when the thing is turned off after firing, addresses the problem. Ummm, I'm thinking that in any incident like this, one of the important bits is what pissed off the cop enough to thumb that safety in the first place. Not that I distrust police, but just to prove real provocation existed. Say, in a court of law.

I note with interest that spokesmen for both the Vancouver and Ottawa police took care to call the Taser "a tool", and that Taser - by its own narrow terms - labels it "non-lethal".

It's a weapon, dammit. Police may or may not need such a weapon in their arsenals. But let's not let the RCMP try to whitewash their use of Tasers. Let's not try to spin them to appear not to be weapons. Let's not let ourselves be spun. Already too many cops and quasi-cops apparently have drunk the soft soap from this heavy-duty spin cycle, and so have used these weapons where they're not warranted. And people - quite arguably - have died because of it.

Image: Siftings, Arkansas Herald

Down. Word. Dog.

The Irregulars have been all over the Word Cop thing, and I have watched with yellow-eyed jealousy. Yet my oppositional defiance disorder has been playing up big-time, so there's no way I'm slavishly following the pack. But. Grammar rants are soooo tempting. And the material soooo rich. So I've decided to bite Mother Corp's ass on pronunciation. Close enough.

We coyotes wake up darned early in the morning. Given our druthers, we like to eease into full awareness with our eyes closed for a bit, listening to the dulcet tones of the CBC announcers who read the early morning news and financials before 6 a.m.

More than a few mornings recently, my sleepy eyes have jarred open in outrage and shot lightning of a kind normally reserved for pre-migraine auras, as those dulcet CBC tones egregiously jackboot certain words. Repeatedly. Word has it that Mother Corp used to have a pronunciation guide, and woe betide the dumb rookie who blew off that part of the exam. But it seems that things have gone to hell since Lister Sinclair booked it, apparently somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. Sure, I'm cranky about it. I'm enough thousands of semi-mythical years old that I've earned the right.

Ottawa Morning's news guy has a cringe worthy speech impediment that causes him to utter the word DEE-fence repeatedly when speaking of things related to this country's armed forces, while the woman from Calgary who covers gas and oil drops frequent clangers about Alberta's REE-source management.

This is just wrong on so many levels. For one thing, Alberta hardly manages its resources lately, it sells gargantuan quantities of them at fire sale prices to ingrate, mostly-US-based multinationals. I digress. We'll speak of the true definition of 'stewardship' another time.

The Oxford Big Word Thingy, Canine Edition, above, or any other Canadian dictionary, is clear on this point, dammit! Defence. Resource. Neither is pronounced with the stress on the first syllable. Unless you were concussed in peewee hockey and have since watched way too much of that sterling grammarian, Don Cherry on TEEvee. Unless your name is Bubba from Alabama and you drive a NASCAR veeHICKle. Or unless you're George Bush. But even the people that elected him have finally realised he's an idiot.

I'm just sayin'.

Record snowfall accumulation?

No. Nope. Noooooooo. Hell no! Not until we've had at least another eighty-seven freakin' centimetres....

The idiot meter

So, the first thing I saw when I finally limped into town this morning -- boy, are my dogs achin' -- was newspaper boxes filled with headlines about parking meters for cripes sake. I go for a quick vacation (my story, and I'm sticking to it...) and La-la-larryland goes (further) to hell.

I recall hearing (As I was being ushered unceremoniously to the Greyhound depot to ride steerage to Sudbury - it's a sore point...) that council wanted to jack up parking meter rates and the total number of hours during which parkers must pay, and the total number of meters. Dog help us, council has realized that the city now needs money after enacting that dumbass budget, back in the halcyon "zero means five per cent" days. And we'll really be scraping for pocket change if Seimens wins that gigabillion dollar light rail transit suit that certain mayors and city councillors so blithely laughed off, just short months ago.

Never mind that the meters were supposed to be a revenue-neutral way to ensure traffic flow in a congested city centre. Never mind that it's just another tax, no matter how disingenuously you try to relabel it. Never mind that you'd basically promised all those neighbourhoods where you're now hellbent on planting meters that you would do no such thing. Never mind that the cost of installing said new meters mostly negates your already-dubious profits. Never mind that Mayor Larry admits (yet again) that the move might've been a little hasty and ill-thought-out. And never mind that faced with huge protests, the parking committee revisits the idea and, after a token concession on Sunday parking hours, jacks the meter rates even more. We're being fiscally conservative, dammit!

Apparently, "fiscal conservative" in this context is synonymous with "idiot".

But hey! Hizzoner says "kindness meters" solve the homeless problem, so I figure my patented Idiot Meter™ will solve this council's hash. See, the meter starts out fresh right after each municipal election, showing all the goodwill that city politicians have garnered. Every time you make another bonehead move, the total drops. When the little numbers on the digital readout say zero, it's time to vacate that convenient city hall office space where you parked your butt. Or you will be ticketed and fined heavily.

So I'm looking at the meter up there, and it's a bit blurry, but I think you have a little... oh, wait! It's all zeros! Time's up! Get the hell outta here!

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