Archive for: July 2010
Snollygoster revival
Taegan Goddard wants to revive the political term snollygoster, n., classically defined by a passage from the October 28, 1895, edition of the Columbus Dispatch (as cited in the OED):
[A] fellow who wants office, regardless of party, platform or principles, and who, whenever he wins, gets there by the sheer force of monumental talknophical assumnancy.
Harry Truman sparked a previous revival in 1952, when he used the word in a whistle-stop speech at Parkersburg, W. Va., complaining about about politicians who make a show of public prayer:
I wish some of these snollygosters would read the New Testament and perform accordingly.
Alas, the OED has entries for neither talknophical or assumnancy, although the University of Windsor English Department once sponsored a poetry series by that name, which it described as, “until now, a nonce phrase with the one known recorded instance of 28 October 1895.”
Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan
How to be alone
Halifax filmmaker Andrea Dorfman brings Halifax poet Tanya Davis‘s words to the screen. Produced by Walter Forsyth. Watch for the Hitchcockian cameo by Dorfman.
Troublemaking semicentennial – corrected
Friends and admirers gathered in the Midtown Tavern’s antiseptic new digs Thursday evening to honor journalist-businessman David Bentley’s 50 years of afflicting the comfortable.
Among the crowd were foot-soldiers of the late, lamented Halifax Daily News (née: Bedford-Sackville News), the once salacious Frank magazine, and the meaty, fact-packed AllNovaScotia.com, which today ranks Nova Scotia’s premier newsgathering organization. As Frank might put it, all three began life as Bentley organs.
In 1974, Bentley, his wife, and two partners founded the weekly B-S News, modeling it after the sordid tabloids of his native England. Five years later, he took the enormous gamble of moving the paper downtown, transforming it into a daily, and taking on both the stolid Chronicle-Herald and the nacent, corrupt Buchanan administration.
After selling the daily to Harry Steele’s Newfoundland Capital Corp. in 1987, Bentley and business partner Lyndon Watkins founded Frank, a legendary tweaker of toffee-noses. In 2001, with daughter Caroline Wood, he founded AllNovaScotia, an online publication that is, ironically, today’s must-read for Nova Scotia’s ruling elites.
When future historians recount Nova Scotia’s late-20th Century transformation from a staid, British colonial outpost to an almost modern society, Bentley will emerge as an unsung central figure. He taught the province that ritual deference to one’s betters is the surest guarantor of mediocrity.
Our betters are still smarting from the lesson.
Fittingly, the quinquagenary brought out longtime Bentley protégé, celebrity shooter, and onetime Frank co-owner Cliff Boutillier, shown honing his lens in preparation for next week’s edition. The Glace Bay native grimaced at the intrusiveness of today’s bloggers with their pesky iPhones.
“Whoever told you sauce for the goose was sauce for the gander,” he demanded.
David Bentley, that’s who.
Vandalizing the census – cont.
Gus Reed really hates the long census questionnaire:
I admit to some disappointment that you have so totally and uncritically capitulated to the Forces of Social Planning on the census issue. Contrarians need to be contrary. Apart from the indisputably careless design of the long form (or the sloppy posting of an unedited version), there are a couple of things that rankle:
Many of the questions are sort of inherently interesting, but that doesn’t mean they should be asked. What government policy hinges on knowing the birthplace of my parents (#25)?
I like this statement attached to the race/ethnicity question: “This information is collected to support programs that promote equal opportunity for everyone to share in the social, cultural and economic life of Canada.” It would be good discipline to have such a statement attached to each question, or at least each section. If the statement is not succinct and understandable, then it’s a good indication that someone’s just fishing: “We want to know where your parents were born because your government is considering a system of preferential immigration based on national origin.”
More argument, and Contrarian rebuttal, after the jump – photos included!
Census: a mistake in the long form
Contrarian reader Gus Reed has found a mistake in Census Canada’s long form questionnaire — or at least in the sample that appears on the agency’s website.
It seems to me that at the top of page 5 the columns should be labeled “Person 3,” “Person 4,” and “Person 5″ – continuing the logic of page 4. Is it my PDF reader that’s wrong, or did StatsCan send out 2.4 million errors?
StatsCan hasn’t sent out anything yet, and there’s still time to fix the error, along with the much more serious mistake of making the long form voluntary. But Gus is right. The headers are inconsistent in a way that might lead respondents to omit information about some household members, or else enter responses in the wrong place. It’s hard to describe the problem without looking at the form, but this ought to be fixed.
Gus has a lot more to say about the long form. Stay tuned.
Kansas finds a bed
At the Valley Motel, somewhere east of Manistique, on Michigan’s Northern Peninsula, the peripatetic Jane Kansas talked Dave, the proprietor, into a cut rate of $30 for this beauty. Later, Dave and his twin daughters showed up with a dinner of steak, real fries, shrimp, rice, cheese, and olives.
“We thought on your walk you might not get many home cooked meals,” Dave explained.
Before bedtime, the girls returned with a banana and a doughnut for dessert.
To the people Jane encounters on her epic walk across the American Midwest, she must seem the oddest of strangers: a short, sunburned woman in late middle age, pushing her travelling gear in a wheeled cart across half a dozen US states – big ones, smack in the heartland. By any normal standard, it’s a cockamamie venture.
And yet, again and again, as Jane documents in her blog at The Coast’s website, people you might expect to have nothing whatever in common with a wandering eccentric respond with a combination of curiosity, concern, and kindness that quickly morphs into friendship. They give her meals, rides, beds, advice, lore, places to camp. She responds with her trademark witty banter and the sort of genuine interest in her hosts’ lives that cannot be faked.
Jane is on the Northern Peninsula in quixotic hopes of catching a ferry to Drummond Island, and then caging a lift across North Channel and the Canada-US border to Manitoulin Island, where her sister has a summer cottage.
The guy at the fish store assures her this is impossible. The guys on the ferry share his opinion.
But an elderly couple in a golf cart direct her to a guy named Tom, whose boat isn’t in the water, but who suggests she try the Thomases or the Zelnicks, just down the road. Tom also gives her a place to camp for the night. At the Zelnicks, next morning, she meets Helen, who invites her in for coffee, and husband Dave. They send her next door to see Jim, and before you can say, “Homeland Security,” Jim, Jane, Helen, and Dave are in Jim’s powerboat, gunkholing along the bays and islands of northeastern Michigan en route to Richard’s Landing, Ontario, and a brunch of eggs over easy, home fries, bacon, and toast. Simple as that. Simple and astounding.
Vandalizing the census – cont.
I have fallen behind posting reader submissions on the Conservatives’ inexplicable attack on the census. Here’s a start on the backlog, beginning (in the interests of equal time) with an email in which Ottawa PR guy Tim Powers, whom I slanged as a Harper sock-puppet, turns a cordial cheek:
Read your blog about today’s Current. I must say I don’t think I have never been called a sock-puppet before. A friendly bit of Cape Breton ribbing is good for the soul.Liked the Dewey headline. I always enjoyed your wit when I was a student in Halifax. Keep stirring the pot!
My slightly sheepish reply:
Like your answers to Jim Brown, your gracious message attests to your skill in public relations. Having come to the field late, and only on parole following a 35-to-life term in journalism, I may be temperamentally ill-suited, but this doesn’t lessen my admiration for those talents.
I know you had a job to do in that interview, but here’s what troubles me. You are a political consultant. You obviously understand the critical importance of a random sample in gathering data that will be used to inform important government and business decisions. Yet you cheerfully adopted as your own the false claim that increasing the sample size would compensate for its reduced randomness.
Doesn’t it degrade political discourse when, in pursuit of partisan advantage, people advance arguments they know to be false? Isn’t this a symptom of what’s wrong in Ottawa? Doesn’t it help explain why people are so turned off by politics and politicians today?
Last word to Mr. Powers:
Let me get to your questions but first note in reality I am not a political consultant. Like most Atlantic Canadians the politics is an addiction I feed voluntarily.
While certainly there was a degree of mischief, part and parcel of political theater, in the discussion on The Current the overall points I was trying to make which I think do serve the debate and don’t reduce the view of the utility of Ottawa:
- there is more the one way to gather meaningful data (something lost in the present uproar)
- this debate has become about polemics and both sides bare responsibility for that
- other than simply returning to the status quo calling for a compromise solution
- though in reality the government may not move for one I’d still like to hear some options
- context: a variety of countries are changing they way they do their own censuses
Part of what I wanted to do in the interview was break people out of the dialogue box we are in and have them ask more questions. That I think can be helpful. Put some more oxygen in our democracy.
There are so many problems with politics today and I try not to contribute to them. Rhetoric was birthed by the Greeks. Three will fight over it Plato, Aristotle and Cicero. I did use some on Friday but in a limited manner. Keep pushing for better! It is important.
Mount St. Vincent faculty may want to flag this exchange as an example of how to handle curmudgeonly bloggers.
More to come.
Quote of the day
Tom Flanagan, the University of Calgary political scientist who once served as Stephen Harper’s chief of staff and who has a long history in the Reform, Canadian Alliance, and Conservative parties, tells Meagan Fitzpatrick of Postmedia News he is puzzled by the government’s decision on the census:
It’s just never been an issue in the Conservative movement. It just literally comes out of nowhere as far as I can see… I think it was an exercise in bad government to suddenly spring this on the public without any previous discussion, no consultation at all. You don’t deal with the public that way in a democracy….
They are alienating a lot of people who have supported the government and would like to continue supporting the government, people who are fundamentally Conservatives but see this as just bad government,” said Flanagan. “It’s not clear to me what they’re going to pick up from this politically and they’re irritating a lot of people who would like to be their friends.
I would go further. Like the Fall 2008 mini-budget and the savage attacks on diplomat Richard Colvin, the census debacle reinforces quiet doubts among middle-of-the-road Canadians about the course Harper will chart if they are ever imprudent enough to give him a majority.
Or to put it another way, if Frank McKenna were their leader, the Liberals would be over 50% in the polls, not under 24%.
Capitalism fails again – updated x 2
California strawberries on sale at the North Sydney Sobey’s, July 23.
No fruit anywhere surpasses a ripe, Nova Scotia strawberry, yet in twice weekly tours of the supermarket produce section during the height of Nova Scotia strawberry season, I have not seen a single basket of local berries. I’ve seen them at the Farmer’s Daughter in Whycocomagh. I’ve seen them at the roadside stand by the Esso station in Bras d’Or. But not once in Sobey’s or Atlantic Superstore.
C’mon, food giants: Is this really the best you can do?
[Update] Shauna Jones of Angry Sheep Designs writes from Whitehorse to say, “Those exact strawberries are for sale here – $3.87.” Ugh!
[Update x 2] TB assures me that the Sobey’s in Sydney River, where the tasteless, white-fleshed, California-reared, pseudo-berries above were photographed, has had local berries from time to time this summer, but they sell out quickly because — surprise, surprise — “people like them better.”
Funny, but I haven’t seen them run out of Cheerios.
Note to food giant: buy more.
HARPER DEFEATS CENSUS
Harper spokespeople argue that sending the voluntary census long form to a larger number of people will compensate for any loss of data quality due to the newly voluntary nature of the form. Milan Ilnyckyj explains the fallacy.
One of the biggest challenges in statistics is collecting a representative sample: finding a subset of the population that will do a good job of approximating the whole group. When a dataset contains a lot of sampling bias and is not reflective of the general population, it is essentially worthless as a guide. That cannot be fixed by using a larger sample size, nor can it be dealt with via fancy mathematics.
The classic example of sampling bias is the ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’ headline, from the Chicago Tribune in 1948. The newspaper got their prediction wrong because they sampled people with telephones, at a time when telephones were comparatively rare. Most of the people who had them were rich, and rich people were more supportive of Dewey. As a consequence, telephone polling provided bad information about the likely voting behaviour of the whole population.
While on the census fiasco, Jim Brown, guest host of CBC Radio’s The Current, was uncharacteristically ill-prepared this morning for his interview with Conservative sock-puppet Tim Powers. He let Powers float unchallenged from one specious talking point to another, even letting him equate the supposed intrusiveness of a standard census question about the number of bedrooms in a respondent’s house to Pierre Trudeau’s decision to repeal laws outlawing private homosexual acts. If you’re going to guest host a national show, you need a passing familiarity with recent Canadian history, and you need to bone up on the issues of the day. Brown is usually better than this.
