My New Blog Crush: Kady O'Malley

Sorry, Tiana, you're looking better than ever, but I have a new blogging crush. Kady O'Malley at Inside the Queensway has been blogging Parliament Hill for Macleans Magazine since last July. In the fall she began live-blogging committee meetings with her Blackberry.

I've been enjoying her postings, skimming through some of the longer blow-by-blow accounts, but enjoying her enthusiasm and amused view of proceedings.

But then a couple of weeks ago, she started doing video commentary with her phone-cam and uploading them to Youtube and I was moved to infatuation. How blown was my infatuation? Full.

Here she is in the Driveway of Power:

Another classic is "There's no good reason why this meeting is in camera."

[p.s. Have you noticed that "mainstream media" bloggers have awful blogs from the standpoint of sidebar content? No profile links, no "top posts", no linkrolls, no tag clouds, no photo albums?]

[p.p.s. If our anonymous CBC commenter the other day was Hallie Cotnam, I just want to say "sorry, I've moved on" to you also.]

[p.p.p.s. To the young lady I have plans with for Friday night, don't worry, we're still on. ]

Let's talk HAIR!

I just got my hair cut. I told the hair stylist, "I want something more MODERN". My hair stylist is about 18 years old, so I figured he is plugged into what is modern. In my mind, I was thinking Megan and foxification. I was hoping for the smokin' hot results that she achieved. I was delighted when my stylist began hacking off my hair and thinning it out. He even got the razor out at one point, which is always fun. He then applied some very expensive hair straightening product to my hair. Then, he carefully dried my hair and used a FLAT IRON (again, I was feeling excited at the similarity with the process involved in Megan's foxification project). I walked out of the salon $50 poorer, and with my hair clinging to my head like a wee helmet. When Dischevelled Man saw me, he tried to be supportive, but I could tell he wasn't feeling it. It didn't go over well when he said, "You've got a tiny little head, don't you, sweetie?". The next day, I washed and dried my new hair MYSELF, and teased it out, making it BIG. This is when I realized -- who am I kidding? I am an 80s chick. I need big hair. I am a big hair chick.

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'.

Aggie's cat observing record snowfall

Uh oh, now what?