Category Archives: News and politics

Over the weekend, the CBC lost one of their preeminent broadcasters to something that smacks of a witch hunt.  Jian Ghomeshi, the former host and co-creator of a radio and television program called Q, was let go by the Mother Corp on Sunday. 

Rather than be nibbled to death by a thousand ducks, Ghomeshi wisely put the story out in all the salacious details and has initiated a very pricey lawsuit against the CBC for canning him.  You can read the whole posting here, but I’ll condense it for you:  A saucy, but consenting, relationship that went sour over time and the threats of exposure from the other party. 

Ghomeshi did the right (and probably very difficult) thing and went to his employer, explained the situation as he saw it and was duly investigated.  There was no formal complaint to CBC HR, no laws broken or lack of consent.  Then suddenly Sunday Ghomeshi is out of a job, with no warning, no notice and no recourse but to take to social media to explain his side of the story.

As many of you remember, our moral compass on sexual antics is simple: 

1. The parties engaged must be of legal voting age in the jurisdiction where the saucy antics are happening.
2. All parties must actively consent to the saucy antics.
3. Show some class and be discreet.  Get a room.

Using our moral test then, children and animals are off limits as they can’t actively consent or are not of age to consent.  The rest of it isn’t our business.  It might be personally uninteresting, unhygienic or simply too weird for words, but it is not our business.  Repeat, is not our business, at least as long the participants are adhering to rule #1 and rule #2.  (Those who like to engage in relations dressed in penguin costumes on a bridge over the 401 at rush hour are breaking rule #3.)

Where the sarcastic that resides here rises up, is the conundrum of another CBC host, Sook-Yin Lee, also a superlative broadcaster amongst her other accomplishments, appearing in the 2006 film Shortbus by John Cameron Mitchell. 

In Shortbus, there were no simulated sex scenes. That scene where Sook-Yin Lee rubs one out is real and no detail is left to our imagination.  Again, CBC threatened to fire Sook-Yin Lee, but viewers, listeners and a line of celebrities intervened.  Wisely the Corp backed down and Lee continues to provide entertaining, informative and frequently magical radio on Definitely Not The Opera.  Her performance in Shortbus or other behaviors in private, or that she has very candidly disclosed have not diminished the popularity, entertainment or sincerity of her work.

Which leads us to suggest that Ghomeshi gets a few hundred of the fabulous celebrities that he has insightfully interviewed to write letters of protest to CBC brass.  The thousands of viewers and listeners of Q will also happily oblige with our regular-schmuck voices.  We will suggest that he leave Billy Bob Thornton off the list, but we digress.

So where does it go from here?  If there is common sense in the halls of the CBC, they’ll recognize that what Ghomesi does off the clock is none of their business, as long as #1 #2 and #3 are adhered to, then logically he should get a nice apology and his job back.  However, the betting line is that common sense at the CBC is as rare as intelligent life in politics, so Jian has some options. 

The first one is to leave the public broadcaster and cast his lot with the private bunch.  CTV/Bell Media should be getting out the chequebook right snappily and contacting Jian Ghomeshi with an invite to move the show to their playground.

The second is to take a few months, mourn the recent passing of his father and let the lawyers loose on the CBC.  The Corp knows they’re already in deep, to at least the tune of the high six figures of a settlement plus costs, so Ghomeshi has a bankroll coming.  Reinvent Q as R and do a deal with Netflix, or HBO, or Comcast.

As for the rest of us, speaking as a regular schmuck listener and viewer, we don’t care what you bang or how you bang it, as long as #1, #2 and #3 are adhered to.  It’s not our business.

Watching the news today is not a good thing.  Ottawa, Canada’s sleepy little capital city was rocked by something that only happens elsewhere.

Facts are still fluid, but here’s the known:  Just before 10 am today an armed gunman ran up to a reserve army soldier standing watch at our National War Memorial and shot the soldier with what has been described as a long rifle.  Our National War Memorial is about 350 yards from the Parliament Buildings, our seat of government.  (Note to our American readers, our Parliament buildings holds both the Congress-equivalent and the Senate in one building called Centre Block, the one with the clock tower.) 

After shooting the soldier who was standing guard over our Tomb of the Unknown, the gunman ran to the Parliament buildings and got into the building.

Moments later the shooter was gunned down by security, most of which was captured on video by a reporter from the Globe and Mail.  You hear what sounds like a shotgun, then more than a two dozen small-caliber replies, probably from armed House of Commons security.

Shot and later pronounced dead in hospital was the soldier standing watch at the National War Memorial.  Corporal Nathan Cirillo, 24, a reservist (like the National Guard for our American readers) of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders of Canada, from Hamilton, Ontario.

The dead gunman was identified as Michael Zehaf-Bibeau a Canadian, born in 1982.  There are no more substantive details forthcoming as of the time of this posting, but that will change.  It appears the gunman had a criminal record for drugs in BC and Quebec.  There are unconfirmed reports that he was a recent convert to Islam.  Authorities won’t say if the shooter was on a watch-list for persons who may be radicalized.

Now, here’s the Unknown parts of the story:  For a couple of hours there were reports of two gunmen.  One witness reported seeing two people get out of a grey Corolla and run towards Centre Block.  There were reports of several shots fired nearby at a large downtown shopping area, the Rideau Centre.  There were reports of another gunman up on a roof overlooking the downtown area.  As we said, it’s still very fluid as real, verifiable (meaning three sources, two of which are real, not tweets or Facebook postings) facts are not rapidly forthcoming from authorities.  The facts will come out, but not right now.

The ugly part of all this, aside from the fear and the needless death is that our little town, Ottawa, is the scene of something very, very bad.  Being a long-time Ottawa resident, more or less for most of my life, I take pride in the peaceable nature of the joint.

I’m proud that our seat of government is open enough that you can walk around on the front lawn, as millions do every year.  Yes, you are under some serious video surveillance and yes, there are armed people around, but they’re unobtrusive and security isn’t in your face.  We even have the RCMP, in full red-serge dress uniform, on horseback, every summer on the grounds, along with the Governor General’s Foot Guards doing the Changing of the Guard ceremony for the tourists. 

Every Canada Day, there’s usually a quarter-million people on Parliament Hill, many of whom have had an ale or five, especially by nightfall with the Canada Day fireworks show.  The worst that can happen is you’ll either get puked on, or surreptitiously fondled. 

Protestors (and there are many each year) more or less keep the peace, aside from the occasional scuffle or some pushing and shoving.  Rarely have we seen riot-geared police lashing out foggy clouds of OC spray, or water cannon hosing protestors down the sidewalk.  We don’t roll that way up here.

Which makes me fear that the next victim of this ugly incident will be Parliament Hill itself.  It will close up tight.       

Joan Rivers passed away today at 81, (in Hollywood years 52) from complications from throat surgery. Like Phyllis Diller, she was one of the first women who did standup and in the parlance of the trade, killed it just about every time she went out.  Vegas, Ed Sullivan, The Tonight Show, films, television and of course, on stage armed with nothing more than a microphone, a glass of water and a spotlight.  She did consummate old-skool standup.  Setup, punchline, setup, punchline, rinse, repeat, topper, kill, bow, get off the stage.

Originally from Brooklyn, Joan Alexandra Rosenberg (nee Molinsky) had a BA in English Lit and Anthropology of all things.  She took Rivers as her stage name on the advice of her then-agent Tony Rivers.  I suspect it was revenge that made her switch from Molinsky to Rivers.

We can joke about her having so many facelifts she has to put pantyliners in the center of her bra, or, when she’s naked, from behind she looks like a Rhodesian Ridgeback, or that her stuff on QVC/The Shopping Channel was so cheap, you’d see a necklace run under the fridge when you turned the lights on.  She didn’t care and if you could give back as good as you got, then game on. 

Or, we could just lament her passing with a pause.

She made people laugh.  Not a bad epitaph for a comedian.   

We’ve been busy over the summer, what with lounging on the deck, taking it easy and generally not giving a blue-nosed damn about much of anything.  However, since school is back in, we figured, hey, let’s do some of that blogging thing again…

Where to start, as the outrages are thick and deep.  We will condense our reactions to the beheading videos over the summer, courtesy of ISIS.  See that red dot on your fellow fighters forehead?  That’s a laser, a targeting laser.  One, nice, slow pull and about 600 grams of rapidly moving metal will adjust your attitude, forever.  Nice knowing you.

Celebrity nudes hacked.  It looks like it was nothing more than a simple phishing hack, an unsolicited email demanding the users name and password to keep their iCloud account alive, ostensibly for ‘security’ reasons.  The celebrities fell for it, sending the hackers the keys to the kingdom, so they could download anything they wanted.  This included, um, intimate, personal, private pictures and videos which have been and are being traded online by the one-handed typist set. 

So, to help out the celebrities whose antics are more or less public now, here’s a little reminder:  Don’t take photos of yourself or your partners with your phone and don’t store them on a computer, ever.  This is why the Polaroid was invented, but alas, the Polaroid camera is no more unless you score one at a garage sale and bucks-up for Fuji’s instant film.  Perhaps a simpler fix then; stop taking selfies of you enjoying a moment and simply enjoy the actual moment with whomever you are enjoying it with. 

Russia either is, or is not invading the Ukraine, depending on how much shiite you want with your sandwich.  The Ukraine has oil, food and money.  Russia does not, or at least not as much as they did before the Soviet Union decided to implode and hand over all their cash to various oligarchs to buy apartments in London. 

The only problem here is that Putin does not care what we in the rest of the world think; he’s quite willing to do whatever he wants to do with the Ukraine and has the army to back it up.  He’s assuming that the rest of the world is a) trying not to starve to death, or b) discussing the latest Kardashian selfie without a care for geopolitics. 

Putin’s right of course.  Most people in the first world couldn’t spell geopolitics, let alone define it, or understand the ramifications of Russia rolling back to the clock to about this time in 1939.  Which explains why the global reaction has the same intensity and depth on intellectual discourse as the Toronto Blue Jays not making the playoffs, again. 

Actually, there has been more discussion of the Jays not making the playoffs on Sports Radio, as the shut-ins dissect the 2014 MLB season with the half-wits and the under-medicated bipolars who now constitute the audience for most radio station call-in shows.  Russia invading the Ukraine?  We’ve got Gord on the line from Pentanguishine: Perhaps the Jays could get a second-round draft pick form the Ukraine National League?  A good left-hander maybe?

We despair of this planet some days.

Sorry it has been a while, but life intrudes sometimes, however, there have been many outrages in the past while.  Our most recent, is the election we’re holding in Ontario right now.

(Quick American translation:  We’re having an election in our state, except Ontario is much bigger than Texas and has two time zones in the province.  Plus, we don’t elect state Senators, as we’re a parliamentary democracy.  Liberal = Democrat, Conservative = Republican, NDP = European Style Social Democrat, or Socialist but Nice about it)

We prefer when it comes to exercising our franchise, to vote for things.  For a particular party, their leader,  a platform, a series of promises, or reforms.  In this iteration of the Ontario Legislature, we don’t necessarily get that option, voting for something.

The campaign has devolved into a smoke and mirrors workshop.  The incumbent Liberals under Kathleen Wynne are saddled with the inheritance of their previous leader, Dalton McGuinty, who was so inert scientists considered him part of the Periodic Table of Elements, somewhere in the realm of Nitrogen gas, or solid Carbon.  Wynne is required to keep a straight face when asked by reporters to explain the grain-carrier Seaway Laker tied to her ankle with a 3” hawser.  She says it was there when she took office after McGuinty resigned a few months ago, someone having conveniently tied a 400 foot long ship to him, the longshoreman having wiped his hands, muttering “That ain’t goin nowheres now”

The Conservatives are saddled with a leader, Tim Hudak and a platform that includes invading Poland in September, to obtain Lebensraum for Ontario.  Hudak’s other big platform plank includes creating more jobs by firing 100,000 civil servants.  This is the intellectual equivalent of determining that dogs are deaf when you cut off all their legs, because they won’t respond to “Come”  Hudak is one of those bug-eyed people who look like his self-importance was inflated to 45 psi over the placarded pressure when the election writ was dropped.

The Ontario New Democratic Party leader, Andrea Horvath suffers from an image problem.  Everyone of a certain age in Ontario remembers what were called “Rae Days” in 1993, when the then-NDP leader, Bob Rae scared himself and the NDP shitless and wound up in the Big Chair at Queen’s Park.  He gave all of Ontario’s public servants twelve unpaid days of leave to reduce a $2 billion dollar deficit.  We long for the days of a $2 billion shortfall now.  Leading the NDP means Big Labour actively hates you, especially since Andrea Horvath’s party pulled the plug on the Liberal Minority government and forced the election.

Locally, in Ottawa South, which was Dalton McGuinty’s old riding, we’ve got his Executive Assistant running as an incumbent candidate and proving that there is no shame in politics, even if you are caught on video up to the bristles in a Berkshire sow.  A Conservative, Matt Young, who says “What Tim says, yep!” and an NDP Candidate, Bronwyn Funiciello, who is personable in a Mary-Kay Distributor way, but knows her chance in this riding is on par with the other five fringe candidates, Libertarian, Green, Special Needs, Freedom and Communist.  It’s really down to two, Liberal or Conservatives here.

Which is where our conundrum sits.  We can’t vote for the Liberals, as their granitic inaction and mind-warping stupidity means another four years of no hope no progress and no money as the last jobs left in manufacturing get sent to Guatemala or Michigan.  Or,vote for a party that promises like their forebears, to gut everything they can get their hands on, including health care, schools, policing, fire services, and the bureaucracy, then private-sector it to their buddies as rapidly as possible under the guise of ‘getting value for the tax payer’.  It would be Mike Harris the Reboot, or Ernie Eaves Mark II.  Plus the whole one-armed saluting of the Conservatives gives us shivers of annexing the Sudetenland flashbacks that we can’t shake. 

We can’t get drunk enough to vote for the NDP or any of the other fringe parties, unless the Rhino Party comes back from the dead and offers to build a bridge along the St Lawrence Seaway as a Public Service Project.  Except they want to build it lengthwise, not across. 

That kind of stupid, we can get behind as a voter.