Tagged: David Rodenhiser
Another irrefutable argument for the serial comma
An anonymous cartoonist strikes a blow for virtuous punctuation:
When will newspaper style guides wake up to its obvious superiority?
H/T Lee Amme Gillan via David Rodenhiser. This has been cropping up on the net since mid-September. If anyone can devine the artist’s identity, I’ll update.
AllNovaScotia punk’d by Denis Ryan
[Updated below] Our friends at AllNovaScotia (subscription required) appear to have been punk’d by [restaurateur] singing investor Denis Ryan and Halifax folksinger-comedian Tony Quinn in a YouTube spoof of a profane Irish expat turning the air blue-green with outrage over the Emerald Isle’s financial travails.
The NSFW clip identifies Quinn as a reporter for “the Financial News,” which morphs to “the Financial Times” in the AllNS piece. As alert Contrarian reader DR points out, however, the clip does not turn up on any site calling itself ’Financial News,’ and the reporter definitely doesn’t say, ‘Financial Times.’
Also, the ‘reporter’ looks and sounds remarkably like local comedian Tony Quinn. You’ll note that at no point does any text pop up ID’ing Denis Ryan, as would normally happen in an authentic news clip, nor is there the omnipresent news agency watermark on the lower right corner. And, finally, the clip ends with a Michael Flatley joke.
Still, as an exercise in Peter Capaldi-grade malediction, the skit is, ah, bracing. Cover your ears, Grandma:
With only 36,000 views when AllNS went to bed last night, the clip barely had the sniffles, but as of 3 p.m., today, it’s on it’s way to modest viral status, with 274,281 airings. That’s well shy of How to Be Alone (2.1 million), United Breaks Guitars territory (9.6 million), or Picnicface (21.9 million) real estate, to cite three Bluenose examples, but not bad for a pair of ‘sixties geezers.
Quinn’s speaker’s bureau website, incidentally, bills him as offering “clean, corporate and convention musical comedy.” Well, he doesn’t swear in the clip.
Update: Roger Ebert gets with the program.
Self-indulgent lefties let Harper off the hook – updated & corrected
Pinto Pony Productions, a small Toronto video production house specializing in non-invasive filming techniques, took to the streets of Toronto this weekend and shot the best roundup of demonstrator-vs.-police violence I could find on YouTube. The protesters did not impress the filmmakers.
The Harper Government made a serious miscalculation with its absurd expenditure on security for the G8/G20. Halifax did a G8 nine years ago for $27 million, and Pittsburg did a G20 last year for $95 million [see correction below]. Harper spent ten times that amount: $12 million an hour over the three days; three times what security for any international leaders’ gathering has ever cost before.
This plays to the nagging doubts middle-of-the-road Canadians have about Harper. It hints at the proto-fascism we suspect lurks in the old Reform core of the so-called Conservative Party. It shows contempt for civil liberties. It bespeaks a brand of hypocrisy that pitches fiscal conservatism out the window whenever the police or the military want more goodies. A week ago, I thought Harper had fatally damaged his chances of getting a majority with this jingoism.
Not now. By making common cause with masked blackshirts bent on smashing windows, burning police cars, and throwing rocks, peaceful protesters have stupidly squandered that advantage. Public opinion, firmly on our side week ago, is now firmly on Harper’s. Spare us any whining about police over-reaction. I just watched all the YouTube videos I could find of the Toronto events, most of them taken by protest sympathizers, and saw little that could be termed seriously out of line in the police response (and I write as someone who witnessed truly vicious police actions in Chicago, Ill., in 1968 and 1970, and in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963). This time, the left was both self-indulgent and self-defeating. (See Update below.)
There was one protest moment that Pinto Pony videographer Bill Stoppard did like, however:
[Update] After I posted this, a video by Meghann Millard surfaced, showing a police attack on apparently peaceful demonstrators who were singing, O Canada! Not exactly Birmingham or Chicago scale police violence, but utterly stupid nonetheless.
Imagine how Harper would look today if this is the only kind of protest police faced in Toronto. Instead, the moronic blackshirts gave him all the excuses he needed.
[Correction] The Halifax G7 was in 1995, not 2001, so 15 years ago, not nine. The federal budget for that summit was $28 million; the provincial budget, $5 million. Lots more info here. Thanks to David Rodenhiser, one of Contrarian’s crack researchers, er, readers, for the correct info.
Liveblog: NSP meets its customers – Day 1
9:15
Roberta Bondar poses with charmed NSP flacks.
My old Daily News chum David Rodenhiser, now laboring in NSP communications, asked Bondar if she had any startling revelations in space.
Many of them. One is that Buck Rogers was a myth. We romanticize space. It’s a very difficult environment. It’s very hard. It’s hard on the body. But you can’t beat the view.
8:40 p.m.:
A surprisingly witty keynote speech by Roberta Bondar began with several slides of Hurricane Bill. These days Bondar makes her living as a professional speaker, but this isn’t shaping up to be a canned speech. Moneyquote:
The Challenger disaster happened because communications failed.
Anyone who has read William Langewiesche’s brilliant account of the Columbia disaster in the Atlantic, knows that communications brought it down, too. More specifically, an intellectually dishonest PowerPoint presentation lulled top NASA executives into the false belief that there was no problem with the shuttle. When junior engineers tried to sound the alarm, their superiors shut them down.
People didn’t want to hear that a piece of foam might have caused damage. How could a piece of foam the size of a football not do damage when it was flying by at 1000 miles an hour.
Bondar’s view of consumers’ and citizens’ roles in energy policy:
You have to listen; you have to hear; you have to learn; and if you don’t, you may be the reason communications will fail. If we avoid something, we will never learn how things can change.
—
Friday, 8:20 p.m.: Nova Scotia Power’s community forum is underway in Truro, and I’ll be live blogging the event in this space tonight and tomorrow, adding observations as they occur to me.
NSP President Rob Bennet kicked off the session with a mercifully short explanation of its purpose: to discuss “the challenges and choices we face, as we move away from coal, not only as a company but as a province.”
Not only as a company, but as a province. This is something critics of NSP need to realize. Nova Scotia’s environmental performance is inextricably connected to Nova Scotia Power’s environmental performance. Like it or not, we’re in this together.
