An ESI contest: Name the Bridge!

The Rideau Canal pedestrian bridge has been open since September but still has no name.

Sure, there have been at least a couple of ideas: The Corktown Bridge, in honour of the Irish workers who helped build the Rideau Canal, and the Nelson Mandela Bridge, a tip of the tuque to the inspirational South African who visited our fair ville in 1990. But neither name seems ready to be uttered in the same breath as Arts Tower, Beavertail or Gloucester Sunrise.

Well, we can remedy this situation by soliciting suggestions. Let's come up with a worthy shortlist of proposed monikers. Then, at a future Emergency Meeting, we'll settle on one we can submit to the City of Ottawa for consideration.

Let the naming begin ...

*ickey *ouse = The Antichrist

When I was wee kit back west, dog's years ago, my littermates and I used to enjoy gambolling in the buffalo grass out back of the local drive-in movie thee-ay-ter. Especially of a warm Saturday evening when there was no full moon anyway. Through the barbed wire, we could see all sortsa interesting things up on the silver screen. I liked the 'toons best... some would say I still do...

So I note with more than passing interest that Montreal's Musée des Beaux Arts has joined France's Musées Nationaux to mount a new exhibition tracing the artistic sources of an icon of American pop culture who had a name very much like, ummmm, Dalt Wisney. For anybody with ADD issues, sorry, you can go sleep now. Here's where us coyotes veer off into semi-obscure paw sucking re: a point or two of copyright wierdness:

Good 'ol Unca Scroo... er, Dalt. The Musée's catalogue for this opus states that:

"the exhibition establishes for the first time a parallel between the original drawings of The *alt *isney Studio and the works of Western – and sometimes other – art that inspired them, from the Gothic Middle Ages to Surrealism. The art of Gustave Doré, Daumier, the German Romantic painters, Symbolists and English Pre-Raphaelites, as well as Early Flemish painters and Expressionist film, profoundly influenced the *isney Studios’ productions."

Inspired? Yesterday, local Petfinder arts maven Paul Gessell played a little journalistic peek-a-boo with this idea in the paper's Arts Sekshun, saying the exhibition curator calls Wisney 'essentially an image recycler'. Then he makes a passing reference to a 'human precursor of Photoshop'. Finally he quotes the museum catalogue stating baldly that Wisney 'plagiarized' any number of drawings for his 'toons.

Yup, Dalt swiped - liberally - from pretty much anyone & everyone. All public domain. Yet nobody seems to have stated the obvious, outrageous irony here: that not so long ago, Wisney Corp led the lobbying charge to extend American copyright protection by, oh, two decades. Didn't want its iconic rodent -- or any of its, ummm, intellectual property -- to enter the public domain. Ever. In fact, the current Wisney business model may be among the world's most rabid defenders of its 'own' recycled public-domain images, calling down the Legal Gods of Copyright on just about any piddley-ass infringer you can think of.

Why? Duh! Ka-chinnnggggg! Yet strangely, Wisney hates the idea of paying copyright to others that might wish to work similar scams.

This wholesale swiping, willy-nilly, from the public domain, then copyrighting the ass offa it offends my well-tuned sense of canine fairness. I rather think actual artists should be free to swipe iconography and play with it too, not just businesses with tonsabux for lobbyists & legal hounds.

And it all leads me toward the sad but inevitable conclusion that based on the evidence, perhaps the iconic rodent with the f(r)iendly smile and all his 'toon buddies have, in the hands of a buncha hellbound latter-day beancounters, been twisted into not just the Wicked Stepmother of Copyright, but the Antichrist.

It's no longer about the art, baby. If it ever was.

Image: David Goodger's Graphics, under a Creative Commons-Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. For us coyotes, the ironies just keep pilin' up....

Regarding Emergency Meetings

1. Something Disturbing at the Usual Spot

I saw something disturbing at the usual spot. First, in the north booth, two people were talking with a laptop computer on the table. It was closed, but out of its case, so they must have used it for something. Perhaps viewing architectural drawings or some other creative project, I thought.

But later, at two tables on the north wall there was a group of four young men who would have looked in place at the tavern the Hobbits stopped at the night after they left the Shire. These young men had two open laptops and were clearly using them to access the internet.

"Are they instant messaging each other?" asked my companion.

"I hope not," I replied. Just then, Lisa came by with my Pepsi. "Lisa, are those guys on the internet."

"Yeah," she said, "somehow you can get it here."

"But you guys aren't providing it, right?"

"Oh, no!" She looked horrified at the idea.

____________________________________________

2. Convenor Responsibility

From the Berkun Blog:

If you called the meeting, do your %*?@?! job. Everyone claims they know about facilitation, but few do it. If you called the meeting, it’s your job to

1. Get there on time;
2. Write a bullet list agenda on the wall;
3. Manage the conversation so no one hogs the floor and the right people get a voice at the right time; and
4. Make sure side issues get delegated out of the room.

If you don’t do all 4, any meeting problems are your fault.

____________________________________________

3. Emergency Meeting

I would suggest an emergency meeting to discuss these issues, but I'm not sure Lisa would appreciate me writing on the wall and we all know how close I am to getting barred all the time.

Finding a New Muse

It's clear that I'm not cutting it as the Stand-in Muse. I've done what I could, but clearly it's not working out. The Intimacy Challenge was a failure. My content lately has been as dull as dishwater. The pressure of being the stand-in muse has really been too much for me.
It seems the likelihood of the 5th Muse's return is slim to none.
I have a few suggestions of people and ideas for the new Muse position:
1) Conch Shell: Many have complained that she hasn't pulled her weight on this metablog. Maybe she has been waiting for the moment to be asked to be the New Muse.
2) Megan: This lovely young woman knows how to get intimate -- if intimacy is what you want.
3) Heather Armstrong: She's famous, so maybe we'd become famous by association.
4) A male blogger: Maybe our focus on finding a female muse has blinded us to some of the Ottawa, postmodern boy bloggers out there who are working through relationship issues, intimacy, and life's struggles.

Hiphuggers

Walking out of the Chateau Laurier gymnasium the other day after a rather vigorous workout with the medicine ball, I spied a couple of young women holding signs.

They read: Free Hugs.

Naturally, I scurried briskly in the other direction, fearing these ladies to be intoxicated.

A short time later, I stumbled across a most interesting website devoted to this vexing phenomenon, The Free Hugs Campaign.

It seems things began when a disheartened young man, returning home from vacation to Sydney, Australia, was so starved for attention he sought the embrace of strangers in the street.

The authorities have now seen fit to ban the movement. But that hasn't stopped the campaigners from recruiting new jihugists.

Actually, it all reminds me of the whimsical days of my youth, as I could often be found strolling around the Kent State University campus placing daisies in the barrels of the guns clutched by National Guardsmen.

Ah, but that was a more innocent time.