The Montana Meth Project
The Globe has a big story about this anti-drug campaign today. Watch these ads with your kids. You won’t soon forget them.
How Very Sad
My goodness gracious! The Free Speech Warrior – the one who is suing me for, um, exercising my free speech – is somehow no longer on the speaker’s list for the conference I told you about the other day! How ever do these things happen?
Oh, and here’s this bit from the National Post:
[“The [Law Society] found Mr. Levant violated the following rules of professional conduct: to “respect and uphold the law in personal conduct,” to “seek to improve the justice system,” to not ” act in a manner that might weaken public respect for the law,” to be “courteous and candid,” and to not “harass any person or discriminate against any person” on various prohibited grounds.”
Have a nice day, buddy!
Good Morning, Mr. Hudak!
The sold-out Ontario Liberal Heritage Dinner is tonight. As you sit at home this evening, contemplating that fact, please let me share with you an interesting little blog post that is a must-read:
Have a nice night, Timmy. We certainly will!
Yours sincerely,
Warren
Grey Hair is Sexy
Dear David Miller
Toronto City Hall politicians – such as, um, you – have never hesitated to lobby Queen’s Park to legislate the end to strikes, no?
It’s time for you to go, lame duck.
Sincerely,
Toronto
Rich in Irony, etc.
One of the participants – the one who regularly declares himself a champion of free speech, and decries libel lawsuits – is, wait for it, suing me for libel.
Guess which one? You get three guesses, and the first two don’t count.
Yawn.
Own Some Humility
There are many things which differentiate Canadians from our American friends: our politics. Our beer. Our health care system. Our gun control laws. And, theoretically, our hockey.
On that last one, however, maybe not so much, eh? And, Sunday night, we received a timely reminder of that.
I’ve lived in the United States, and I can still recite the Pledge of Allegiance. I love America and Americans. But one of the uniquely American character traits – their must-win ethos, which sometimes manifests itself in arrogance and overweening pride – is one of the traits that we Canadians have never shared. We Canadians have always tended to be a bit less boastful, a bit less cocky. And we have been proud, you might say, about not being American proud.
I started to sense that a perceptible shift was underway a few weeks ago, when I was in a movie theatre with my kids and I saw this: Coca Cola’s Olympics hockey ad. Take a look at it again.
So there you go: an American-headquartered multinational reminding us in a glossy, focus-grouped spot – a spot that, I admit, is beautifully-shot and shrewdly-constructed, with about a half-dozen product placements – that hockey is our game, and let’s remind everyone that it is. It’s manipulative, like all advertising, but it’s a manipulation that can only ever work if the intended targets (ie., us) have signaled their willingness to be manipulated.
We did that earlier on, I think, with this “own the podium” onanism. At the time, I dismissed it as a bit of jingoistic fluff – some ad exec’s flight of fancy. But, eventually, it became apparent that some Canadians – a lot of Canadians – had bought into it. We’d become American-ish, you know? Medals, medals, medals! We’re the best! We will crush you! Grrrr!
We are the best country in the world. We are, we are. But one of the ways we have gotten a lot of Canadians (and non-Canadians) to agree with that is to not say it. Undersell and overperform, Chretien used to tell those of us privileged enough to work for him: in politics, as in life, it’s a workable premise.
We are well on our way to being taught a valuable lesson in these Olympics, I think. I hope it’s a lesson that, four years hence, we heed.
Rah, rah.
The Power of Vampire Weekend
You know what they’re doing, but you are powerless to stop them. Personally, I surrendered when I saw Ezra (VW’s, not the emotionally challenged one) leaping onto stage with Toronto’s F**ked Up and throwing it down.
The chorus is both irritating and catchy as catchy can be. Weird. Here they be, on MTV:
The Blue Screen of Death
That’s what I had waiting for me on my main office PC this morning.
You know you are in big trouble when you call Geek Squad, or whomever, and they say: “Uh-oh.”
Hopefully we can do a data recovery long enough for me to extract files. Then it’s possibly off to Mac Land a lot sooner than I expected. There’s only so much Dell/Windows crap you can endure, before the cost benefit becomes nil.
Also, anyone know if it’s still impossible to sync a Blackberry with a Mac?