Vanillied
24 Jan 08
Main Entry: Vanilli
Function: transitive verb
Inflected Form(s): Vanilli·ed; Vanilli·ing
Date: 2008
1 : to mouth the words of others
Posted by pzed on January 24, 2008 at 6.48pm
pop goes the weasel
8 Jan 08
Plavcan, J. Michael. “The Invisible Bible: The Logic of Creation Science.” Scientists Confront Creationism: Intelligent Design and Beyond.Eds. Andrew J. Petto and Laurie R. Godfrey. New York: Norton, 2007. 361-380.
It is almost as if the creation scientists place God within a box of the literal truth of the Bible. They have in a sense erected “Schrödinger’s God.” Open the box (by questioning the absolute literal truth of the Bible) and one might find that God is dead! (377)
Posted by pzed on January 8, 2008 at 10.15pm
birthday girl
16 Dec 07
Some girls want diamonds
Some girls want pearls.
Some girls want straight hair
Some girls want curls.
Jodi, on the other hand, just wanted some snow to shovel on her birthday. She got it!
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Posted by pzed on December 16, 2007 at 12.08pm
Apostrophe’s
7 Dec 07
I’m pretty good at apostrophes, actually, and other Englishy stuff. But I can never remember whether the third-person pronoun “one” is made possessive with or without the apostrophe. His, hers, its, all take none, and of course “one’s” is correct and doesn’t follow this pattern.
So, lazily, whenever I have a memory lapse around a grammar or spelling (or in this case, punctuation) thing, I’ve taken to dropping the word in question into a Google search. Google’s number one hit for “one’s”? A wikipedia entry on Eating one’s own dog food.
Posted by pzed on December 7, 2007 at 11.19am
a nation whispers, “we always knew that he’d go free”
28 Aug 07
In 1959 a twelve-year-old girl named Lynne Harper was brutally murdered near a small town in Southern Ontario. I was born seven years later in a city about an hour’s drive away, and as a child growing up in the 70s I can remember people still talking about the murder. Of course, Lynne Harper’s wasn’t the name I knew. The name I knew was Steven Truscott.
Truscott was 14 at the time of the murder. He was tried, found guilty, and convicted to death by hanging. The death sentence was commuted to life in prison and he was later paroled and lived for a number of years under another name.
This is a man whose name I have known all my life, always connected to the notion of wrongful conviction. As a child I remember my grandmother referring to him as that poor boy who went to jail when everybody knew he didn’t kill that girl. But go to jail he did. The public reaction to his being found guilty was mixed, but of historic importance here is the public outrage at the idea of the state executing a 14-year-old boy. In many ways this case led directly to the abolition of the death penalty in Canada.
The simplest argument against the death penalty is that you can’t bring the wrongfully convicted back. Men like Donald Marshall, Guy Paul Morin, and David Milgaard might not have lived long enough to see the invention of the DNA technologies that exonerated them. There are, of course, more sophisticated arguments to support the abolition of the death penalty, but this simplest one seems incontrovertible.
Today, that seems like a bit of an aside. Today, 48 years after going to jail for a murder he didn’t commit, Steven Truscott was acquitted by the Ontario Court of Appeal.
Sources
CBC News. In Search of Justice.
CBC News: the fifth estate. The Steven Truscott Story: Moment of Truth.
R v Truscott. The Canadian Encyclopedia.
Steven Truscott. Wikipedia.
CBC News. Wrongfully Convicted.
Tragically Hip. Wheat Kings.
Posted by pzed on August 28, 2007 at 9.58pm
on tragedy
21 Apr 07
One of my favourite columnists, Rick Salutin, concludes an article in today’s Globe and Mail with:
Can our society devise a set of social controls that prevent explosions like Virginia Tech, but do not require severe repression and an impossible return to the undesirable traits of earlier eras? A teacher of mine, Herbert Marcuse, phrased this as: Can you have non-repressive desublimation? — mainly showing how hard it is to even formulate the question. Can you have a non-racist, non-patriarchal, non-sexually repressive, non-hierarchical, non-authoritarian yet orderly society that manages to control its potentially aberrant members? What would it look like and how would you get there? That’s the utopian project for our time. The two scripts in the past 50 years that claimed to have an answer — Marxism and free-market ideology — have lost most of their legitimacy. The floor is wide open. (After VT, a sense of unease – behind a subscription wall)
It’s nice to see someone in the press, and I’m not surprised it’s Salutin, digging a little deeper. If Scott Horton’s summary of world opinion in Harper’s is indicative (The Tragedy at Virginia Tech, Viewed From Abroad), the European perspective (“around the world” means Madrid, Paris, Hamburg, and London) is that gun control, or the almost total lack thereof, is the problem. I’m more inclined to think that the American refusal to implement meaningful gun control is more of a symptom, or at least a byproduct, rather than a cause. I tend to agree more with the self-described “songwriter-turned-journalist who merely finds the art world very glamorous” Momus who argues, in part, that the extent to which “the American nation (and perhaps, by extension, a little less obviously, any nation) is founded on systematic violence” must be recognized as a contributing factor (The problem lays a floral wreath at the grave of the problem):
You’re supposed to stand behind a nation when it suffers a misfortune of this magnitude, but here the “misfortune” is so hard-wired into the American system, the American way of life, that you’d be standing behind the problem, taking off your hat in honour of the problem, remaining, for two minutes, silent about the problem while the problem lays a floral wreath at the fresh grave of the problem.
Momus illustrates his point with a graphic that shows the dimunition of Indian territories in the US from 1492 to 1977, clearly underlining the violence on which America was founded, but a similar graphic of Canada would show the same pattern, perhaps to a greater degree, and yet Canada has nowhere near the gun problem the US has.
Oddly, Xeni Jardin of Boingboing on Wednesday did a round-up article similar to Horton’s, called VA Tech shootings: world perspective in which she cites Dan Gillmor, Wonkette, Keith Olbermann, The Los Angeles Times, and the Asian American Journalists Association. I guess by “world perspective” I foolishly expected Jardin might include something that was, say, not by an American.
Horton begins his article by stating that, while in America the inevitable debate over gun control is underway, in the rest of the world “the assessment is uniform.” Sadly, I don’t think there’s really any debate over gun control in America. There are certainly a number of people who would like to do something about it, but they are vastly outnumbered by a majority who don’t seem capable of realizing that there might even be ways of doing things that aren’t American, let alone considering that those foreigners might actually have a better way. Real gun control advocates, those who would ban handguns and assault rifles outright and limit the number of hunting rifles a person could own; those who would argue that guns, like cars, should be registered—real gun control advocates are the lunatic fringe in America. And in the rest of the world, America is the lunatic fringe.
Posted by pzed on April 21, 2007 at 5.56pm
This just in
13 Feb 07
I’m wondering if anyone else considers the Agreement reached at North Korea nuclear talks to be bad news. If I remember correctly, the so-called list of axis of evil countries included North Korea, Iraq, and Iran. Not that there’s really an official axis of evil list somewhere; I mean, when there’s only three, who needs a list?
But this agreement calls for North Korea to be taken off the list. I guess that means Bush or somebody will come out and say “NK is no longer on the AOE list,” which is all well and good. Assuming that Iraq is also off the list, having been “liberated”, and also assuming that none of Syria, Cuba, or Libya have been promoted to the list, that pretty much leaves Iran as an axis of evil unto itself. And that can’t be good.
Posted by pzed on February 13, 2007 at 4.29pm
a nation of pirates
27 Jan 07
After “oot and aboot”, what’s the thing Americans most often ask Canadians to say because they think it sounds funny? “Park the car,” of course. And it’s because we can’t help but say it like the pirates we are. Watch Trailer Park Boys a few times, then listen to yourself carefully—you know it’s true. And now Hollywood has caught on.
Some 15 or 20 years ago I remember talk of the Turks and Caicos Islands applying to become a Canadian province. For Canadians this would have provided two benefits: a warm place to winter without having to show a passport, and year-round access to a place to park the sloop. For the Turks and Caicos I suppose it would have meant access to the federal transfer payments programme.
This would not have been the Islands’s first experience hosting pirates (for example), but alas, it never came to pass. I’m thinking now we should be making a bid for Sealand.
Posted by pzed on January 27, 2007 at 2.37pm
VII liberal arts of blogging
25 Jan 07
A pretty good attempte. Peraventure ye knowe much of the middel ages, but nat of thes topiques. After al, thys quiz is fairlye specific. It hath no thing concerning Germany, for ensaumple. Cursid be my ignorance!
cf. Myn first quizz!
Posted by pzed on January 25, 2007 at 3.13pm
Words are important
14 Oct 06
At work yesterday I received an email that had been forwarded four times in order to land in my inbox. The original sender was an employee of a publishing company sending a Word document to a staff member at my university. The document was called “book display poster windsor oct 12 2006.doc”, and its contents are exactly what the title would imply. Why would I bother writing about this? Well, the original email contained nothing but the .doc attachment and the following:
This message contains confidential information, may be protected by legal rules relating to privileged information, and is intended only for the individual named. You are hereby notified that unless authorized any dissemination, distribution or copying of this e-mail, or disclosure of its contents to anyone, is strictly prohibited. Please notify the sender immediately by e-mail if you have received this e-mail by mistake, and delete this e-mail from your system. Thank you.
The staff member who received the confidential book display poster forwarded it to all the members of the School of Social Work in which she works—perhaps 20 people. Her email said “Please see the attached poster” and it in turn included this:
The information in this e-mail is directed in confidence solely to the person(s) named above and may contain confidential and/or privileged material. This information shall not otherwise be distributed, copied or disclosed. If you have received this e-mail in error, please notify the sender immediately via return e-mail and destroy the original message. Thank you.
There’s an important difference between these two warnings. The first at least allows for dissemination if authorized, whereas the second quite clearly states that distribution is prohibited. One of the recipients of the second, a faculty member, in turn forwarded the email to a librarian colleague of mine. Her email said “thought you night [sic] be interested in the bookshow below”, and she too included the caveat:
The information in this email is directed in confidence solely to the person(s) named above and may contain confidential and/or privileged material. This information shall not otherwise be distributed, copied or disclosed. If you have received this email in error, please notify the sender immediately via return email and destroy the original message. Thank you.
Note that the faculty member spells email with no hyphen. Otherwise the text of her warning is the same as that of the staff member. My colleague forwarded the whole mess to me, thankfully with no such warning.
Do I need to add that I consider warnings of this nature absurd and unenforceable? Perhaps the lawyers in my readership will set me straight, but surely this kind of thing has no legal weight. Can I honestly be expected to have entered into an agreement not to share correspondence simply be having received it with such a warning? I doubt it. Not to mention the fact that I only received this email because three people ignored such warnings.
Finally, most importantly, I think including blanket legalish warnings of this nature in the signature of an email greatly diminishes the notion of confidentiality. Admittedly, the phrase used is “may contain confidential and/or privileged material.” Perhaps that leaves it up to the recipient to determine whether to consider the email confidential, but the clear intent of these warnings is to give the impression that it was sent in confidence. It concerns me that by slapping the word confidential on correspondence that is in fact not only not confidential but is actually intended for dissemination, we begin to lose the sense of what confidential really means.
Posted by pzed on October 14, 2006 at 10.30am
