Driver, follow that canoe!

It's time for some fresh ideas to make Ottawa the great city it can be but rarely is. The Research Director and Painted Stick came up with two molto buono proposals the other night. I just sat, listened and announced I would steal them for the blog.

Here is the first, courtesy of P.S.: A water taxi on the Rideau Canal. Other cities we love -- Chicago and Venice, to name just two, have 'em. Why not Ottawa?

All those folks who skate downtown to work from the Glebe during the six weeks the canal is actually frozen would no doubt enjoy taking the O-town vaporetto down our Unesco-worthy waterway the rest of the year. It could stop at all the little skateway entry points. We could even have "articulated" water taxis to negotiate those curves and make OCTranspo passengers feel at home.

Thoughts?

Stuck Inside of Riverside With the Richmond Blues Again

It's coyote season again!

Local media have returned to the evergreen story of coyotes (gasp!) eating cats in the 'burbs, and of death squads hunting us down. The only new twist is that the killers are trying to appropriate the touchy-feely language of psychobabble to explain how they 'manage' coyote/human interactions by 'establishing boundaries'.

I guess maybe guys who murder stuff for a living have a lot of trouble with their karma. And, this being Ottawa, they've decided to try to re-spin the cosmos.

The one on CBC Radio One's Ottawa Morning positively squirmed when Kathleen Petty cornered him into admitting out loud that 'managing' pretty much means 'killing'. He drove the semantic bus straight back to 'management' as quickly as he could, but you could practically hear Kate's eyes roll when he did.

I still find it fascinating how many urbanites want houses with all the perks of country living, as long as they don't have to, you know, deal with the actual messy ruralness of it all...

So I just wanna say, in coyotes' defence, that these suburban excursions ain't exactly our fault. You saw this morning's news story about car companies falling over themselves to licence Bob Dylan's voice for their in-car GPS systems? They didn't make it out to be a done deal, but since Bob is the Head Coyote, I'm pretty sure that our contractual confidentiality agreements can be loosened to let you know that we coyotes have already been beta-testing it.

So those coyote encounters? It ain't us, babe. The test version, like Bob, has, ummm, mumbly moods. Any coyote that has not ingested massive quantities of hallucinogens at some recent point in their life has got no hope in hell of translating the incomprehensible blithering.

Hey. That incomprehensible blithering is why he's our oracular spiritual leader in the first place...

But we, like, you know, end up lost in places we shouldn't be, starving and eating cats to survive. As you may imagine, our karma suffers terribly from this. However, I'm sure they'll fix it in the production models...

Together at Last

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

(OTTAWA - Aug. 21) Ottawan’s have waited for this moment. And now it’s here. Two musical greats bring down the house in this once-in-a-lifetime concert event.

On Saturday night at Britannia Park, on one stage, at one time.

Bruce and Britney: Together at last.

Hear some great collaborative songs:

Hit Me Baby One More Time (and I will go to the Woman’s shelter)

If You Had a Rocket Launcher In Your Pants

Toxic (Chemicals that is)

I’m a Slave 4 U and Your Fascist Architecture

Rumours of Glory Booty

It’ll be social justice-alicious.

-30-

We Love Zoom, or The Canadian Culture, Eh! Game

Zoom, you've been concerned that Canadians have no culture. You have also mentioned in the past that you love playing games. So, today I took the photo above for you, so that you can play at spotting the five things that are part of our Canadian Culture in the picture (click on it to enlarge).

Have fun! And, yes you will get a prize out of this.*

*Contest only open to those named Zoom who own a blog named Knitnut.

Dirty. Secrets. Buzz. Shower not included.

We ESIs have a recurring conversation along the lines of: Are we simply shameless? Or are we desperately shameless?

With that in mind, a new book caught my roving eye: Dirty Little Secrets of Buzz by David Seaman.

Now here's an author who walks, er, rather, runs, the talk. Scribe Seaman promises in a press release to jog around New York's Times Square naked if his book doesn't crack the Amazon.com Top 100 within three days. That takes cajones, or at least the willingness to flap them in the Big Apple breeze for all to see.

"With the recession as it is, sometimes an author has to put everything on the line to get attention for a worthwhile and exciting read," Seaman says. "Book sales are down at an apocalyptic rate for most authors due to the downturn, and I'm willing to take a risk here . . . This book is worth my reputation, and possibly a couple nights in prison."

The tome is billed as "the definitive guide to guerrilla fame and cutthroat viral marketing."

And the ESIs should leap on Seaman's advice like Jack Layton pouncing on a can of mustache wax.

A few choice chapter subtitles:

* Celebrity Tabloids: Getting in them or staying out of them
* Enemies are more important than friends
* Be Outrageous or Die!
* Google juice: hot links from highly rated sites
* TV doesn't make you - you make you
* Get ten thousand visitors for free through StumbleUpon
* Overcoming publicity post-partum depression: Knowing when and where to find the next hook

Having said all this, I'm not sure Ottawa is ready for the ESIs parading their individual wares down Elgin Street if we fail to win a CanBlog Award. (With the possible exception of Coyote, who never wears pants.)