As the Telus Communications strike enters its third week, reports out of Edmonton this morning that this city’s workers have been offered an incentive to cross the picket lines: an iPod. No word yet on whether any of the workers have put the soundtrack to their lives ahead of their livelihood. I wonder is it […] More »

IT’S THE SUMMER PARTY! THIS MAGAZINE IS 39 YEARS OLD AND IT’S STILL GOT WHAT IT TAKES TO GET YOU GOING. JOIN THIS MAGAZINE at Cadillac Lounge, 1296 Queen Street West Thursday, August 18th at 8:30 YOU CAN WIN INCREDIBLE PRIZES! LIKE, A Cinamatheque Ontario Dual Membership; an Art Gallery of Ontario Family Membership; and […] More »

Not much going on over the last week, as I toured Ontario wine country and swam in Al Purdy’s glorious Roblin Lake. Oh, except I managed to be watching CNN just as conservative columnist Robert Novak misplaced his brain, swore, and wandered off the set like someone looking for the coffee station. So that’s something. […] More »

Looks like another conservative leader has royally screwed up a half-assed attempt to reach out to Canada’s aboriginal community. The Toronto Star reports that Ontario’s PC leader John Tory sent a letter addressed to Matthew Coon Come at the Assembly of First Nations, asking for invitations to aboriginal events and boasting of his party’s efforts […] More »

Here’s something for all you crazy copyleft anarchists out there. An open source beer recipe some students in Denmark came up with as an exercise in creative commons-like open sourcing. See the BBC news piece: Free Beer! Just think, now that whole cryptic malted barley, water, hops and yeast conundrum is finally solved. We don’t […] More »

Allow me to draw your attention to a report on New York Attorney-General Eliot Spitzer nailing Sony for payola, the practice of bribing radio types to get airplay for artists. The immediate result was a $10M settlement and a promise from Sony to stop the practice, which is a more sophisticated version of direct “pay-for-play” […] More »

Thanks for everyone who has participated on this blog for the past year, it has been great fun. I’m off for a while. I’ll leave you with this passage from Timothy Garton Ash’s book Solidarity, which seems more relevant today than when I read it yesterday. At the very least, it might help clarify just […] More »

The Guardian today is running a 14 year old story on Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s abandonment of Marxism-Leninism as the official ideology of the Soviet Communist Party. Was it only 14 years ago? Back then (well, before then really — more like 1989 I imagine) there was a communist bookshop across the street from the […] More »

Britain does not have the death penalty. So say you were to walk onto a subway, drop off a backpack full of explosives, and subsequently kill a few dozen people. If they managed to catch you later, and were able to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law (where you would have […] More »

A spate of drownings in Ontario and Manitoba over the weekend has spurred renewed calls for better water safety and mandatory swimming lessons in schools. That’s from the CBC. The idea is being pushed by Carolyn Bennett, who I almost defeated in the 2000 election,. She’s still doing better than me: she has since gone […] More »

1. If you were going to spend 26 hours on a three-hop trip to Lithuania from Montreal, what podcasts would you bring with you? 2. Anyone know of any good Polish rock/punk/electronica/etc? More »