Slurpees and Murder

Manitoba Links Weekly: No, We Don't Learn (ManLinkWeek 15)

2012-01-24T18:00:00.002-06:00

What, really, Tuesday already? Wow, that was quick. All right, roll out the ManLinkWeek!

[bostoncrew82 YouTube: Personality Crisis - Monteray Pavilion Winnipeg 19.4.83]
A few weeks back I'd posted a roughly-twenty-five-minute set by a historically significant punk band playing Winnipeg in 1983, so here this week is... another roughly-twenty-five-minute set by a historically significant punk band playing Winnipeg in 1983. I don't know if this is becoming a trend on YouTube or what, but man, would I enjoy it if it did.

War on Music had rereleased the Personality Crisis 1983 Creatures for Awhile LP a few years ago, but their stock has long since sold out. (The 1990 UK reissue would run you sixty bucks on eBay, but forget that noise.) So this is some pretty rare footage of some pretty rare music, and not a half bad way for your computer speakers to spend the next half an hour or so.

[Music Trader Blog: JOHN K. SAMSON LIVE! @ MUSIC TRADER]
Free John K. Samson show? Free John K. Samson show, this Friday night at 7:00 inside Music Trader. Friday is a high of -5 and a low of -10, so it wouldn't be terribly uncomfortable to hang around outside, but if you'd really rather be indoors to see him play I would recommend getting there early. (It is, as I'm sure you're aware, not the largest venue.)

[92.9 KICK FM Facebook: Dear friends, today...]
Oh, and in a less encouraging story, our radio market is losing one of its very few remaining stations that doesn't play Maroon 5 or Kid Rock. The news doesn't come as a complete surprise; the campus and community radio policy was revised and released in 2010, although the CRTC has been inconsistent about those revisions would mean. But the end of the year may very well mean one fewer community station on Winnipeg airwaves, and knowing the CRTC we can expect that frequency to be some corporation's new Hit Music station by the spring of 2013.

[Progressive Winnipeg: Assiniboine Avenue Vindication]
Speaking of unsurprising, the consultants behind the Assiniboine Avenue bikeway project were charlatans who fudged numbers and forged consultation, nobody on City Council could be bothered to listen to public concerns or question the information they had been handed, and nobody involved in the whole mess would admit that any wrongdoing or impropriety had occurred until the relevant documents were forcefully wrangled out of the system through Freedom of Information action.

I wish I were more excited or optimistic about these revelations than I am, and I wish I could say that we all learned something from this (or at least, learned something we didn't all already know) -- but ours is a city that very steadfastly refuses to learn from its mistakes, never mind the idea of ever correcting them. You can literally listen to the Mayor talk about the story for five minutes and never once hear anything resembling a commitment to any concrete change or safeguards in future consultation projects; he won't even commit to not using those exact same consultants again.

My pessimism for the future aside -- what a ray of sunshine I am today -- this is the culmination of tremendous work by Graham, who struggled against the various departments of City Hall for well over a year on this case, and whose art display runs until the 28th if you might like to check out what else he gets up to.

[Erica Glazier: Oversocialized!: Damn cold on the prairies: a photo essay.]
The photos are nice, but I really love the concept expressed herein that looking out the window foreshadows one's day in Winnipeg because the industrial smoke and steam and whatever the hell else is going on out there behave differently depending on how extreme the cold is outside. I'd love to see somebody better with science than I am (granted that this isn't a particularly stringent requirement) do a series treating our city as one big interactive experiment, running around and using our uniquely miserable climate to explain why smoke floats differently in the air and how soap bubbles freeze into solid structures and why heated beverages vanish when thrown. There are probably a million fun things that aren't normally possible in places where it doesn't hit minus-forty, so we may as well have fun with them when it does, you know?

[The Crime Scene (Winnipeg Sun): City libraries under the microscope]
Good news is hard to come by these days in the world of library economics, and as with most economic comparisons Winnipeg leaves sparks behind for how hard it scrapes along the bottom of the rankings. It would also appear that we as a city are not big readers to begin with; our circulation and visit statistics rank dramatically low, though Montreal somehow manages to make even us look good on that front. (Literacy as a whole could be doing better in Canada, actually.)

Securing funding from levels of government remains a widespread library concern in the continued (and continued, and continued) economic downturn, certainly no less of a concern here in our financially bungling city ($1B debt by 2014!) and forever have-not province. Financial challenges require continual creativity, and Turner notes in a follow-up post that the WPL will be rolling out smartphone service in the near future to try and drive usage, so here's hoping that it succeeds beyond anybody's wildest expectations and that the ensuing statistical bumps will earn our city's public libraries a healthy financial infusion. And I'm not just saying that because of my MLIS degree and my continued near-unemployment.

(Augh, I knew I should have gone into Landfill Helping.)

[Slurpees & Murder (UPTOWN Magazine): Off-track discussion]
I keep meaning to plug my own columns when they drop on Thursdays (every Thursday, I get to tell people now), but by the time they're out I'm usually occupied with writing for the next week's deadline. Then I work the late night weekend shifts slinging cheap hooch for nickels, derp around with the guys on Sunday, get Reader Submissions lined up for the new week, and then -- what, Tuesday already? We just had a Tuesday!

Anyway, speaking as I was earlier of us as a city never learning anything, you would reasonably expect after one-hundred-and-thirty-some-odd years of train service that we would have figured out how to not get hit by trains. But, nope! Not our style. These accidents on tracks still happen with astonishing regularity, and so -- with only a few months left before the grand opening of our rapid transit corridor -- the capital-c City had to warn the lower-case-c city that walking on the rapid transit tracks can get you hit by a rapid transit bus. Some folks around town took a bit of umbrage to this apparent patronization; what, do they think we're stupid? And the answer in this particular case is, no, they know we're stupid. So, for how often I disagree with the City, I can say they got it right on this one.

Thank you for reading ManLinkWeek!

Manitoba Links Weekly: Nothin' But Ice (ManLinkWeek 14)

2012-01-17T13:00:00.004-06:00

It's the middle of January, it's cold outside, everybody is pretending to be surprised. Settle in and warm up with some ManLinkWeek!

First up:

[One Man Committee: Winnipeg Internet Pundits turns one]
Happy almost-Birthday, Winnipeg Internet Pundits! The one-year special tomorrow evening will feature WIPs alumnus Rob Galston (who spent this past week explaining why he does not care for the City's interpretations of its own Osborne Village secondary plan), and will also mark the final regular show for One Man Committee author Walter Krawec. I've considered it a privilege to be on the airwaves alongside Walter, whose thoughtful reflection and keen insight always ensured a robust discussion of the issues, and hopefully in future we'll be able to have him on as a guest from time to time to balance out whatever lunacy is falling out of my mouth that day.

A whole year of radio already, my goodness, where does the time go. Onward to Year Two! Knowing this city, I'm sure there'll be no shortage of topics to explore in the coming year.

Oh, speaking of: I did my best to minimize overlap today between this post and the recent WIPs link roundup, but said roundup was so thorough and so crammed full of noteworthy things that I was bound to duplicate at least one of them. Between here and there, I doubt very strongly that you will go wanting for local interest items to read today.

[Observations, Reservations, Conversations: Seasons of Tuxedo]
Okay, so, get a load of that video. Between the surprisingly ominous future-synth musical selection and the somehow-instantly-dated CGI, does this feel like the early build of an old scrapped PC version of Shadowrun to anyone else? Any second now a bunch of megacorporate vampire trenchcoat elves with shotguns and cybernetic right eyes are going to rush out of that specifically generic chain restaurant, and then it's going to be on like Polo Park up in here.

That's another thing that kept throwing me off while I watched this video: the store names on the walls. This is something of a silly personal diversion, but I always get a kick out of spotting placeholder text easter-eggs that folks sometimes sneak into things to see if anyone will ever notice. So obviously I was pleased to see that the flagship IKEA (which will helpfully have its wordmark written in house-sized letters across its roof) will be joined in the Seasons of Tuxedo development by the following distinguished retailers:

"BARKINSOCKS"
"POTTERY POT"
"E-clipse" (how that store survived the dot-com bust I'll never understand)
"CAMP CLUE"
"riff-raff"
"NEW YORK COMPANY"
"DIGITAL LIBRARY"
"TOMM FOOLERY"
"SAVVY" (clothing for pirates, one assumes)
"SLEEP TIGHT"
"Fashion place"
"OCARINA" (!)
"Grindstone"
"LOTS-4-TOTS"
"THAT'S THE TICKET"
"PLAYER'S CHOICE"
"OFFICE STOP"
"CINEMA", obviously an anchor tenant, airing a showing of what is either a raccoon or the Pringles mascot

And my personal favourite of the stores:

"NOTHIN' BUT ICE"

I don't even know why that's so amusing to me. I just love the idea of people constantly walking into that store and asking them what they sell there.

Now, the fun of their making up names isn't exactly what threw me off; IKEA being the only confirmed tenant thus far, the video guys needed to get a bit creative to avoid having all but one of the stores be named "Lorem Ipsum". No, what really got me was that they went to the trouble of making up dozens of fictional stores, each of them with their own wordmark and colour scheme, and then, after doing all of that, they went "hell with it" and tossed in three real-life logos. Covered up only just enough to obscure the full name of the store or product, but left in their original fonts as typographic telltales to screw with dudes like me who are looking for funny fake store names.

ANYWAY. I very much dislike the entire concept of the Seasons of Tuxedo development, and I dread its future implications for our infrastructurally bankrupt sprawl-happy city, but, hey, I got a chuckle or two out of its promotional video for reasons entirely unrelated to what the video was intended to accomplish. That's a positive, right?

[Policing, Politics and Public Policy: Winnipeg Police Pull 2010 Annual Report from Website]
And so the saga of the Winnipeg Police Service 2010 Annual Report continues, with no end date in sight. It went from being late to being late and wrong, then went from being late and wrong to being sheepishly retracted for amendment, and when they do re-release the poor thing again (presumably for real this time) it'll be even more overdue and it'll remind everybody of the whole debacle all over again. Then, too, when you open up the question of statistical credibility in police documents -- particularly when taken alongside our Crimestat's reputation for shortcomings and inaccuracies -- well, that's a can of worms that isn't easily closed again.

And we still never got a French version of the Annual Report! Man, seriously.

[Grant's Tomb (Brandon Sun): Every city is triple-A!]
And speaking of keeping authorities intellectually honest with statistical analysis -- I know that I linked to a Grant Hamilton article last week, and I try to run an informal soft-ban on using the same site two weeks in a row, but this piece is tremendous and not getting nearly enough love or attention.

Remember, of course, that we live in a province where the standard media protocol for news releases is to slightly rephrase them and then dutifully repeat whatever it was they said -- so perhaps I should consider that I've been living here too long, that perhaps I am just being unduly impressed when a newspaper worker responds to the claims of seated politicians by actually applying things like critical thinking and careful scrutiny and reasonable suspicion. And graphs! Look at all that. Look at all the effort that this man has gone to, in a situation that very rarely receives or requires any effort at all. (You will note as an example how readily Winnipeg's traditional media outlets were willing to accept the Winnipeg Police Service 2010 Annual Report, before a dude on the internet happened to saunter in and do everyone's homework for them.) Good for Brandon! Between this and the whole oil boom going on over there, Western Manitoba isn't doing too badly for itself; good thing they haven't thought to secede yet! Ha! Ha ha ha! oh god, please don't leave us

[UPTOWN Magazine: Best of Winnipeg 2012]
Hey, it's that time again! UPTOWN's Best of Winnipeg list tends to arrive around May or June, so this isn't an immediate priority on your to-do list or anything, but when you have a few minutes handy you should definitely drop in on it and do your part to celebrate what makes this city ~~great~~ ~~fair to good~~ not unlivable. It may also behoove you to review last year's list and the year before that, if you're blanking on any given category, or if you remember being cheesed off about one of the winners and want to make a point of voting against them this year.

Boy, the Best Video Store category ought to be a real hoot next year, huh?

[Co.Design: Coming Soon to Canada: Igloos That You Spray On]
Articles written about Winnipeg for publications based elsewhere will most frequently, almost invariably, involve some sort of variation on the theme of "HEY, did you know it gets COLD in WINNIPEG?" This article is not an exception on that front -- but the important, not-unwelcome difference here is that it employs this revelationary reveal in the service of presenting something as being completely awesome.

The design and (as it were) construction method featured here is one of the five winners in the Forks' Warming Huts competition, and it is the one that most captures my imagination by far. One is scheduled to be laid down this coming Friday -- weather permitting, because it's been a bizarre winter around here -- but when you have technology like this, why stop at just one? I'd be absolutely delighted if they went bonkers with this thing and laid down a hundred insta-igloos all clumped right together, a whole village of substantive yet impermanent structures raised overnight with little more than water and science. (Nothin' But Ice!) Put fifty each in a line on either side of the skating trail! Use the combination of their invaluable shelter against the outside world and their constant flux of population to craft some kind of artsy metaphor about the simultaneous importance and intangibility of human community, or something like that, I don't know, you guys are the artists. Look, just give me the hundred Ice Pillows already, we'll figure out how to explain them later.

Also, the other thing that I really like about this warming hut design is how hard it'll be to burn it down.

And, finally:

[Kijiji Winnipeg: FREE BACON !!]
I don't -- I just -- I don't even know where to begin with this.

Here is this store's official website; here is a smudgy flyer for some of their products. The store sells snow blowers, and drywall, and extension cords, and beef. The store is named "KND Marketing".

"get a free package of Bacon with every purchase from KND Marketing this week!!! Come to 60 debaets Street, and view all out products in our showroom, and or place a special order for somthing you need, and get a free package of bacon!!"

If you drive to their building in the St. Boniface Industrial Park and buy something from them -- an electric fireplace, a hunting stand, a standalone shed, a 22-ton gas log splitter -- they will hand you a package of bacon. This is a thing! This is a real thing.

I really don't know what else I could add to that, so... thank you for reading ManLinkWeek! Stay warm out there.

Manitoba Links Weekly: Funtown is Beautiful (ManLinkWeek 13)

2012-01-10T12:00:00.002-06:00

We've got a lot of ground to cover this week -- and, when you see the third link, you'll find I mean that quite literally -- so let's roll out the ol' ManLinkWeek.

[Winnipeg O' My Heart: The Bloom Is Off The Rose]
The post you see above has been the big ripple in the local blogosphere pond as late, and rightfully so; it's a very eloquent examination of the city's zigzaggery between charming and awful, and the response it seems to have drawn from longtime Winnipeggers is a cheerful hey-now-you-get-it welcome that would probably seem bizarre in other places.

Sooner or later, Winnipeg catches up to you; the crime and cold and poverty live up to their reputations, your closest friends move away to literally anywhere else they can move, and the city's underlying current of constant casual racism -- like some low-level Yog-Sothothery, a gradual but everpresent corrosive force lying not particularly well hidden just behind the veil -- continues to wear away at whatever rogue warm-'n-fuzzies might emerge from other facets of local life. On the other hand, you can live comfortably here on a budget that wouldn't pass as pocket change in other cities, everybody you know is apparently just hiding around the corner waiting to bump into you, and you can wear sweatpants for a week straight without ever seeming out of place. Hooray for balance!

[the cold cold ground: like an old beat up buick]
"it can be excruciating at times living in a city that somehow always finds a way to hold itself back."

This post, which makes reference to the post linked above, offers an interesting contrast in its reversal of perspectives; where the above looks at Winnipeg from a background of living in other cities, this instead looks at other cities from the background of living in Winnipeg. One outside-inward and one inside-outward, the former seemingly more flattering than the latter. And it is frustrating, the sentiment he fleshes out here, that constant mental graph of the forever-lengthening distance between what the city is and what the city could be if it could only get its act together.

Discussion occasionally pops up about what any given city might be like as a person, but in the grand scheme of things Winnipeg is really more the family dog -- and not a purebred or a show-dog or anything like that, just that one goofy mutt your folks had that clearly hadn't been bred for intelligence. It was charming and perhaps even sort of pretty in its own homely, quirky way, and you loved it to bits (despite itself) once it had time to grow on you, but you never could bring yourself to respect it; it is difficult, if not impossible, to respect anything that never learns from its mistakes. Not that you didn't want to believe in it! You wanted so badly to give it the benefit of the doubt, that it wanted to be good and maybe just hadn't yet figured out how, but then every time you turned around it would do something stupid and harmful to itself like eat its own poop or dart into traffic or chase the exact same skunk that ruined everyone's evening two weeks ago. The Winnipeg hometown experience in ten words is "I love you, but cripes, what is wrong with you".

[CanHighways.com: Manitoba Highways at CanHighways.com]
Anyway, in the same vein of wanderlust and highway nostalgia as the Buick-themed page above, here are photographs of Manitoba highways. No, hold on, I don't think I'm conveying the scope of this site properly. Here are the most photographs you have ever seen of Manitoba highways, spanning well over a hundred different Manitoba roadways including several Winnipeg thoroughfares and a few now-decommissioned provincial routes. I'm serious, poke around that site for a while, it's pretty impressive.

[beautifulwinnipeg.posterous.com: Winnipeg is Beautiful]
But perhaps roads are not your bag, perhaps you are more into old buildings and pointy bridges and accidentally-remaining patches of urban greenspace. Erica Glasier's recent project has every possible kind of thing you could want and a few things that you wouldn't expect in a civic picture gallery, so between this and the highways site you'll be able to sink the better part of a day into your tumblr reblogging or whatever it is kids do these days.

[People, Places and Things: Me VS. The Stairs. (Some silly stick men.)]
And on the subj... hey, speaking of wh... hey, while we're... nah, hell, I don't know, I'm out of segues. Here is a CreComm student drawing herself falling down the stairs.

[archiewood YouTube: Funtown Part 1]
Not that I'm telling you anything surprising, but old television programs produced in Winnipeg were more often than not completely bonkers insane. What you are about to watch is... not an exception.

Every so often you'll run into somebody who claims to be freaked out by puppets, and if you're anything like me you usually brush them off in your head like "pffffft, okay, dude, good luck with that". But then you'll see something like this -- note the passage from 1:42 to 1:47 where the Archie Wood puppet twitches in place for three seconds and then snaps his head ninety degrees around, like a Candle Cove outtake -- and begrudgingly admit that, okay, maybe puppets are kind of freaky sometimes. Note also this excerpt from the comments section below the video: "I remember watching this when I was a little kid. I don't remember it being this fucking demented."

I do kind of want to dress up as Grandpa Wood for next Hallowe'en now, though, even though pretty much everybody will mistake it as a Hipster Colonel Sanders costume. (Grandpa Wood's head shape and diagonal pointy beard also remind me of the Mu spirit from EarthBound, because I completely wasted my childhood.) And I'm sort of surprised that there was never a Venetian Snares remix of the Funtown theme song, because, man, listen to that thing.

Anyway, if you were watching this video just now and thinking "this is nice and all, but what I'd really like is for the puppet to do an Anne Murray cover", well, here you go. I am probably not doing any of this proper justice by writing about it while sober.

[Grant's Tomb (Brandon Sun): Name that park]
To conclude today's segment, here are at least a dozen different things that you previously hadn't known about Brandon. Never let it be said you don't learn anything from this feature!

ManLinkWeek, every Tuesday; we'll see you then!

Manitoba Links Weekly: I like the King Fu panda (ManLinkWeek 12)

2012-01-03T16:00:00.004-06:00

Greetings from Cafe D'Amour! The newly-established closest coffee shop in my neighbourhood finally opened today, so of course I'd promptly hunkered down there with a laptop. That's right, I'm being that guy today.

Let's crack open some ManLinkWeek!

[Policing, Politics and Public Policy: Flaws in the 2010 Winnipeg Police Annual Report]
Edmonton's crime problems are remarkably similar to ours in size and scope, and their police service had their annual report out by the middle of March. Producing the previous year's police report within a reasonable timeframe of turnaround allows police and policymakers the opportunity to more accurately gauge the year to come, plan more effective reduction and prevention strategies, and more clearly determine causality between initiatives and their intended results.

The Winnipeg Police Service 2010 Annual Report was released last Wednesday. Yes, the 28th of December. F'real. But at least, with the service having spent this entire year trying to explain the previous year, we can rest assured that the data and conclusions therein are accurate, right? Heh... heh heh. Heh. Yeah, uh, about that.

Yes, as former Deputy Chief of Police and current University of Winnipeg Instructor Menno Zacharias explains here, the data therein is wildly and quite hilariously askew; our Police reassure us that reported crime dropped by seven per cent last year, despite the actual numbers in the report indicating that crime rose by nine per cent. In fact, the Report was put together poorly enough to warrant a part two and a part three from Zacharias, and furthermore we can't even be entirely sure he's done yet. [Edit: he wasn't.]

[Winnipeg Internet Pundits: Goodbye, 2011]
Anyway, if the Winnipeg Police Service 2010 Annual Report is out, that must mean that 2011 is over. So here is a handy link list to thirteen local year-end roundups, discussion of which is entirely likely to seep into tomorrow's radio program.

[fenicnarfabc YouTube: Pierre Lalonde - "À Winnipeg" (les nuits sont longues) (avec paroles)]
My French is pretty roundly awful, so for obvious reasons my grasp on this song is tenuous at best. And yet, despite that, I have periodic episodes -- sometimes for up to hours at a time -- where my brain decides to cheerfully stick this song on loop in the back of my head, unbidden and for no particular obvious reason. But I can't sing the song properly, because I don't know the song properly, so anyone who happens to be near me might hear passing snippets of "À Winnipeg, les nuits sont longues... hmm-a-hmmm hmm hmmmmmm--"

I'm not building to anything in particular with this anecdote, really, I just want you to share in my problems. Enjoy the song!

[reddit Winnipeg: For you Winnipedditors who have a Telus smartphone plan]
One of my scandalous, not-so-secret shames is that I've been hitherto unable to afford entry into the exciting world of smartphones and mobile technology. I'm broke, man, I don't know what to tell you. You kids these days with your i-Berries, and your Black-Phone-Fives, and your I-don't-even-know-whats -- back in my day, telephones came out of the wall. Which was the style of the time! Now, to make a call cost you five nickels, and in those days, nickels had bumblebees on them. "Gimme five bees for a quarter", you'd say.

Now, where was I? Oh, yeah. My last (and only) cellphone was a hilariously old pay-as-you-go piece, one I was eventually forced to abandon when it ceased to receive calls and the hardware would have been cheaper to replace than repair. So one of my makeshift new year's resolutions is to get back on the mobile grid, partially just so people can find me -- I'm told I'm not an easy man to get ahold of -- but really more because I do a lot of driving in far-flung areas, and a cellphone is a smart thing to have in the event of a breakdown. But therein lies the problem! MTS has the best coverage across the province but (obviously) doesn't exist outside of it, so if I do find a permanent full-time library position outside of Manitoba I'd have to buy out any plan I might agree to. Rogers -- which exists nationwide and would thereby be less of a hassle if I had to move -- claims to have reception that covers most of the provincial population, but if there's one thing that you really shouldn't rely on it's the word of one of our national telecoms.

And Telus? My internet sleuthing into the matter brought up the thread linked above, and, well:

"I was a Telus employee and user for years. There is nothing you can do to convince me to ever go back to them."
"I used Telus for years and utterly detested them. The service is absolutely the shits."
"I assume that when Telus hires staff or signs a new dealer, they do a criminal background check. Anyone who doesn't have one is rejected."
"I'd avoid telus if you do any rural travel."
"Telus doesn't have decent coverage as soonas you leave the boundaries of the perimeter, even in the city it's pretty poor. I had a Telus phone for three years and hated every minute of it as I use my phone for work. I once dropped a customer calls six times in 3 minutes with full bars showing on Telus...horrible."
"Telus does not give a fuck about you as a customer."
"I have a pay-as-you-go phone from 7-11 that way outperforms anything Telus used to provide me."
"Before dealing with Telus, you should consider buying a phone off eBay from someone stealing and selling phones to support their crack habit. They'll have a better sense of ethics and morality than anyone at Telus. You're less likely to get ripped off, and you'll probably get better support from them."

So, uh, yeah. That sounds encouraging.

Ultimately, I'm most likely just going to end up getting another of the dirt-cheap pay-as-you-go phones, which will once again mean I'm locked out of the smartphone game -- a game that, as an information professional, I really need to start playing just to get and stay current. ALAS #firstworldproblems

[Observations, Reservations, Conversations: Rogers Closing Video Stores in Winnipeg]
Speaking of Rogers (and speaking of first-world problems), the rapidly-going-extinct video store is now that little extra bit more extinct than it had been before. I recognize in writing this that extinction is a binary concept -- a thing is either extinct or it isn't -- but I can't be bothered to bring myself to describe something like Rogers Video as "endangered", or as "threatened", because both of those words carry the implication of something being worth the attempt to save. Oh, no, not Rogers, please don't take Rogers away from zzzzzzzzzzzzz

Dobbin is right that the option to rent a video game was a handy one, but I also have to admit that I haven't rented a game from a store in who-knows-how-long either. (A lot of games now offer free downloadable demos, although it's impossible to determine whether this is a cause or an effect of game-rental decline.) When you think about it, video game rentals were actually the start of this whole mess; the rental ball of yarn really started unravelling when Blockbuster initially announced the end of late fees, a revolutionary step that resulted in probably-millions of video games going completely missing and a none-too-hasty backpedalling to "the end of late fees except for video games". Ah, those were the days.

[Twitter: TodayOnEbrandon (todayonebrandon)]
"Hey im just letting you guys know there is a thrift shop in shilo, i bought a brand new Ed hardey shirt there for 4 dollers."
"She was beheaded for miscarrying a male heir. It doesnt make their actual love story any less beautiful."
"i like the King Fu panda"

eBrandon brainwaves in concise, doubtlessly-out-of-context single-serving shots? Don't mind if I do!

And, finally:

[Uncommon Sense (Uptown Magazine): A goodbye — and a challenge]
Uncommon Sense columnist Mike Warkentin has announced he will be stepping down from the weekly role he has filled since mid-2006, ending an impressive five-and-a-half-year run of quality weekly content. It's safe to assume he won't be taking that time to slack off; as the founder of Crossfit 204 and managing editor of CrossFit Journal, his future endeavors likely include fighting wild bears and then flexing hard enough to burst his shirt like the Hulk. Look at this dude, he could probably crack all of us in half like toothpicks.

You may infer from this, alert reader that you are, that Uptown Magazine will thusly require the services of a newly-minted weekly columnist. But where might they find such a person? You can't see it, not through the medium of text, but I'm pointing at myself with both thumbs right now. (You can imagine how awkward that makes my typing, but I am very committed to this.) Yes, that's right! As of this coming Thursday's installment, I am very privileged and disproportionately excited to announce that I will be contributing weekly columns to Uptown Magazine for the foreseeable future. Get hype!

Ahh, man, is it ever good to not be in 2011 any more. Thank you for reading ManLinkWeek!

156 Lines About 26 Letters: Your Local 2011 in Review

2011-12-31T10:55:00.002-06:00

Now, don't go thinking that I'm making a habit of this or anything, just because I happened to do this sort of thing last year and I happen to be doing it again this year. Entirely coincidental, I assure you!

The following had been intended for a live radio reading, one ultimately scuttled when the University of Manitoba Security Services wouldn't let me into the building. (It would seem that I am vastly more dangerous than I let on, or rather, more dangerous than I had hitherto been aware I was. The Most Dangerous Man in Winnipeg!) So I am afraid that the text version will, once again, have to suffice.

Yes, it's been a big year! It's also been a pretty terrible year. I do have a wee bit of positive personal news to report -- a rarity for me, this year -- but I can save it for the year oncoming; if I'm hoping for it to turn out well, the last thing I should want to do is get 2011 all over it.

But enough preamble! Let us mercifully put the past year behind us, and I do hope you will enjoy:

156 Lines About 26 Letters: Your Local 2011 in Review.

[---]

A is for Air Canada personnel,
who consider our downtown a circle of Hell
uninhabitable owing to its defacement
by (cough) "rural Manitobans" in "displacement".
Despite our best efforts, the airline, still nervous,
left almost as rudely as its usual service.

B is for Bedbugs, now widely freeloading,
and B is for Byfuglien drunkenly Boating.
B for the By-election all forgot here,
B for the Beethoven movie that shot here,
and B for the Beer you might get stabbed for buying;
nothing but Bad news in the B's, I'm implying.

C is for Christ the King School, which purported
to Crusade against fetuses being aborted
by offering school Credits for students to protest,
because Catholic guilt is what solves women's woes best.
In the ensuing outcry these plans were soon ceased,
Principal David Hood shortly after released.

D is for the former Discreet Boutique,
its exit uncharacteristically meek.
Panhandlers were blamed for its closure so speedy
(even by smut standards our downtown is seedy);
as Air Canada left, it joined the procession,
the better part of valour being discretion.

E is for Eadie's curse-laden intensity
and peculiar definition of density,
sounding F-sharps at his coworkers' gall
in approving a fourplex he liked not at all.
His message to progress, unflinching and hard:
"Not In My (foul language redacted) Backyard".

The aforementioned F had an awful year too;
a Fifty-man melee broke out at the Zoo.
Firebombs and Flooding ate up the whole summer,
Pat Martin's F-bombs rendered everything dumber,
Fort Richmond was declared the new Gaza Strip --
suffice it to say, F has been a bad trip.

G is for Garbage, subject to more fees
despite claims of maintaining a properties freeze;
our Mayor, who'd vowed to lock tax rates in place,
renamed this a "levy" to try and save face
but the upshot is still paying fifty bucks more,
for really the same services as before.

H is for Hours, less than a half dozen
between the implementation and discuzzin'
of Justin Swandel's morning fever-dream fares,
proving of "due diligence" that no one cares,
as it passed in Council by that afternoon --
twenty-five more cents for each transit ride soon.

I for Infrastructure, not up to code
with its hundred-year-old water pipes that explode
nor its one-fifth of roads marked as Poor and so grave
that the City declared they're too damaged to save.
Yes, our leaders gave up; you will, too, when I fill y'in
that our Infrastructure deficit's now four billion.

J is for Jets, our civic vindication;
fifteen years of obscurity and frustration
absolved in an instant, ignore though we might
that they're still just the Thrashers and still sort of bite.
Our feel-good story of the year, even still;
a .500 hockey team, soaked in goodwill.

K is for Keys to the City, and KISS;
them being together proves something's amiss
when the list for our civilian honour most high
is to, one, be famous, and, two, be nearby.
Shallow, yes, and small-time, but this too shall pass;
we're convinced leeching this fame will make us world-class.

L is for Leadership, or what's left of it;
two parties were forced to take that job and shove it.
Tory Hugh McFadyen resigned in disgrace,
having gained no ground after five years in the race,
and the Liberal Gerrard leaves his party in care
of, well, we don't know; nobody else is there.

M for "Manitoba Time", which was sent
around without explanation of what it meant --
then when the public universally panned it,
its ad wizards said we just don't understand it.
"The campaign will make it make sense", we were told,
an outcome that still remains yet to unfold.

N for the New annual record we've set,
38 homicides with time left over yet;
it's hard to pin down any one single cause
for this rampant disregard of homicide laws.
The comforting advice you're bound to hear stated
is, don't worry, mostly they're premeditated.

O is for Osborne, a neighbourhood changin';
like Santa's reindeer the big chains are arrangin'.
On, Subway! On, Safeway! On, Burger King, too!
On, Shoppers Drug Mart and A & W!
Of American Apparel as well it's composed --
but not Movie Village. That's about to be closed.

P is for Pipestone, out where they sell smokes
without collecting taxes -- a fine deal these folks
put together to provoke a Native rights scandal,
one thus far the province prefers not to handle.
Smokers seem unconcerned that the law has no part in
selling cigarettes at fourty bucks a carton.

Q is for Question, the one they'd been hopin'
to answer with "yes, 2013 we'll open" --
but government sources of funding have dried,
and the Holodomor still remains a divide.
So what is our Museum's opening range?
For now, 2014. (Subject to change.)

R is for Russ Wyatt's valiant crusade
when a store in his ward didn't have enough shade.
Yon evil Wal-Mart he rebuked when he said
that he'd counted their six trees, two of them dead.
So the next time you doubt Council's usefulness, please
think of how hard they work as they count all those trees.

S is for Signage, most often quite passive,
but one sign downtown was so bright and so massive
it hassled the neighbours and frightened the birds,
blotting out the sun with its brightly lit words
until City Hall ordered it be taken down --
though of course you will note that the sign's still aroun'.

T is for Terminals, both old and new,
though one left the other with nothing to do.
Such abandonment we were all shocked to discover
(somehow, since the Airports are next to each other)
and an alternate use we must now seek to find--
oh, wait, we can knock it down? Good! Never mind.

U is for Urine at sporting events,
brought up as a topic by some malcontents
forced to wait in lineups as washrooms were brimmin',
complaining of having "to line up like women".
So trough demands spent two days in our headlines,
as a helpful reminder that we're out of our min's.

V is for Violent crime, in which we lead --
it's nice to have something in which we succeed --
and while it may seem a most tempting mistake
to fret about a title we can't seem to shake,
no one else seems worried; it's well understood
that we now have a hockey team, so, hey, we're good.

W is for the Waste treatment plants,
and around a billion litres of pollu-tants
only partially treated when they were released
into rivers where flooding had only just ceased.
So, figuring what our reactions would be,
they spent a month keeping this in secrecy.

X is the mark that you make on a vote,
or you would if you did, but it's clear that you don't;
voter turnout decline has become so accurs-ed,
even Gail Asper rapping has failed to reverse it.
'Ere the tally of school trustee ballots be noted:
fourty-three thousand eligible, three thousand voted.

Y is for "Yurt"; no one knew what it meant
(it turned out it's some sort of exotic tent)
but then brave Occupiers brought social reform
by laying tents, then leaving for somewhere warm.
That camp now lays broken, its movement inert,
but we'll always hold fond memories of their Yurt.

And Z is for Zilch, which is to say none,
the number of Grey Cups we seem to have won
in two decades, despite our occasional prank
of reaching the big game and proceeding to tank.
The parade plans yet again we're forced to shelve,
not holding our breaths for this year twenty-twelve.

[---]

See you in the New Year!

Manitoba Links Weekly: We'd Like to Wish You All the Best, From All of Us (ManLinkWeek 11)

2011-12-27T13:00:00.003-06:00

Well, hello there! I trust that you all enjoyed a pleasant and comforting holiday season, one filled with tidings of good cheer and with goodwill to all men. Oh, me? Yeah, I was driving down Osborne on Christmas Eve and a guy sideswiped my car. So, y'know. Fun.

But, let us not dwell on that little bit of unpleasantness; let us instead reflect calmly upon the week and the season, with a suitably festive and relaxed ManLinkWeek.

[CoreJunkie YouTube: Minor Threat - Winnipeg '83]
HA HA NOPE, PSYCHE

IT'S -- IN YOUR HEAD! IT'S -- IN YOUR HEAD! IT'S -- IN YOUR HEAD! FILLL-LERRR! YOU CALL IT RE-LI-GIONNN, YOU'RE FULL OF SHIT! FILLL-LERRR!

Hey, y'know what cheers me up? The adorable little station break included at around 16:48 of that video. Ha ha ha, aww. So cute!

[Winnipeg Sun: Polo Park hit with pepper spray]
Anyway, yeah, this happened. Of course this happened.

The CBC coverage would later reveal a more comprehensive account of the story, in that two upstanding young gentlemen -- one wearing green and one wearing red, as if to give gang warfare that extra festive spin -- met in the hallway outside the Apple Store to settle their beef, and one guy only pepper-sprayed the entire south end of the mall because the other guy drew a knife on him. That makes the story a bit more... not 'heroic', exactly, but perhaps more justif... well, not really 'justifiable', either. How to phrase this? It makes the whole thing make more sense, is what I think I'm getting at.

A far cry from this, yes, perhaps, but nonetheless as classy as always around here.

(Meanwhile, in Regina)

[Christopher Leo: Shoppers Drug Mart in Osborne Village: Be careful what you wish for]
Neighbourhood diversity : the goose :: corporate profits : golden eggs.

Note in particular the concluding paragraph, which brings up the very real possibility that this decision from the Board of Adjustment can now be cited as precedent in any similar future applications. Any other major retailer wishing to build on two or three stores' worth of space can convincingly argue that they deserve the same opportunities the City has already granted to Shoppers; bring in another development or two like that one, and there, as they say, goes the neighbourhood.

The way things are developing around here -- pun unintended -- it may be time for us to all just go hide on Sherbrook and hope that the City never figures out where we went. Race you to the Standard!

[Anybody Want A Peanut?: Destroying brand new infrastructure: It's a Winnipeg Thing]
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha--yeah, that's us, all right. This sounds like something we'd do. The other levels of government told us we have to finish this project by a certain date or they'll yank its funding? Fine -- but they never said how long the finished project has to stay there! Ha ha! WE SURE SHOWED THEM.

[The Cranky Beer Blogger: Review: Lakeshore Creek Classic Lager]
I hope you're ready for a big surprise! (The surprise is that there is no surprise.)

[CBC Manitoba: Winnipeg Arena Queen portrait going on auction block]
You'd think that we as a city could find somewhere to hang this, but apparently you'd be wrong in that thought. I don't know how much it would cost us to acquire it -- nor is anyone willing to offer an estimate -- but would anybody really be terribly opposed to the City snapping it up and hanging it off some building downtown? Couldn't we weatherproof it, nail it to a wall, and just pretend it's one of the countless murals we have around town? How hard does it have to be, really, to find three hundred and seventy-five square feet? C'mon, son.

[RetroWinnipeg YouTube: Landau Lincoln Mercury Christmas jingle (1989) - REMIX]
Anyway, Happy Holidays! To get hyped for next Christmas, please feel free to loop this for the next three-hundred and sixty-three days. Or no, wait, three-hundred and sixty-four. Leap year. Right.

All the best to you and yours from ManLinkWeek! If you need me, I'll be on the phone with MPI.

Slurpees and Murder Record Club: Leise Rieselt Der Schnee

2011-12-23T12:29:00.002-06:00

The WIPs Year-End Special I'd previously mentioned didn't quite pan out, owing to some scheduling difficulties, but since it would have overlapped with the public hearing for the controversial Osborne Village Shoppers proposal I sort of doubt anybody noticed anyway. (Pundit-wrangler Tessa Vanderhart was embedded at the event and live-tweeted it on @internetpundits, if you'd wondered what the ambiance there was like.)

I had dragged out, dusted off and digitized a seasonally appropriate local album from the ol' record collection to use for musical interludes, and since the whole Christmas season will be over in three days I figure I should share it with you folks while it still makes sense:

The Winnipeg Mennonite Children's Choir (1973)
[website | history | founder bio | I couldn't find anywhere that sells this album, so you'll just have to make do with this ]

I hope you don't mind a few clicks and pops here and there; I did what I could to clean the audio quality up, but the age of the item and the condition I found it in only allow for so many miracles to be worked. (There's one particularly unsettling warble in "Il Est Ne Le Divin Enfant" that I couldn't shake -- but, hey, maybe you like your Christmas music a little creepy.)

The tri-lingual fourty-voice choir was founded in 1957, this particular album recorded inside the Westminster United Church in 1973. I dig the song selection variety on this record; there are a some songs on here that you really don't hear very often any more, and many of the songs that tend to be overplayed this time of year are freshened up here by a switch into German.

(I'll be honest; I straight-up despise most of the standard Christmas repertoire, and it's not like it ever changes.)

I know I tend to overexplain when I post these, so I'll keep the highlights brief. "Alleluia, Sing FOR Joy" -- that's exactly how it's written on the album label, I don't know why -- is badass in its own curious way for a Christmas piece. "The Virgin Mary Had A Baby Boy" gets a surprisingly funky rendition, although a lot of that stems from the organ's effort. "The Sleigh" is less than a minute long, but dang if I don't enjoy every bit of it; I'd probably like all Christmas music a lot more if it involved this kind of urgency. I never quite know what to make of "Huron Indian Carol", but it's done as well here as it's done anywhere. And I really wish the audio quality were better on "Kling Gloekchen", because the two-part harmony in the first half of the song is really quite nice.

I rather doubt I'll be posting again before Christmas, so, Merry Christmas! And Happy Holidays, and everything else that applies this time of year. Only three more sleeps until Boxing Day, Winnipeg!

Manitoba Links Weekly: Popcorn, Publishing, Portage la Prairie Punk, and Pilfered Parrots (ManLinkWeek 10)

2011-12-20T13:00:00.002-06:00

Tomorrow's edition of Winnipeg Internet Pundits will be a two-hour Christmas special, airing from 4:30 to 6:30 PM on UMFM 101.5. There will be retrospectives, musical interludes, the year's best segments, reflection on the past and future of our city, and even -- I'm not sure why I'm presenting this like it'll be a selling point -- brand new poetry. So tune in!

Ah, but first things first. ManLinkWeek hits double digits! Let's see what seasonal items are floating around out there in the big wide worl--

[Winnipeg Free Press: Free Press boasting of an online fire]
--oh, hey! Look what we have here. The Free Press' yule log was one of its most notable experimental forays into online features last year -- that and the live traffic circle camera, that still cracks me up remembering it -- so it's nice to see it make a return, now with the added benefit of being able to photobomb it from the News Café window.

As of this writing the stream also prominently features figurines of four Flinstones characters, with Melissa Martin adding the following in the comments section:

"For those who do not know the lore: last year, an anonymous reader sent us the Flintstones figures in an unmarked envelope to be added to the Yule Log."

It's times like these I miss working at a job where I had dual monitors. (Well, really more that I miss working at a job where my education meant something, but the dual monitors were a nice perk.)

You may recall that the Free Press log channel was originally launched as a reaction to Shaw's planned -- then shouted down and hastily unplanned again -- monetization of their annual yuletide log channel. I thought then, and I still think now, that Shaw was looking for spare change in the wrong place. If they really want to draw that bit of extra coin from their existing services, here's what they should (nay, need to) do: pick an unused number on their channel listings, charge retro enthusiasts like me a buck a month for it, and relaunch this format. Easy money! But, alas.

[eMCeeZ LoG: COMING SOON: Selkirk Avenue Banners]
These look like they'll be pretty nice; certainly nicer than their predecessors, although that's admittedly not so high a bar to clear. It's the little things, you know? It'll be reassuring to look up and see that somebody's taken the time to spruce up the place, rather than gazing upon the dilapidated remains of faded early-1990s(!) designs.

[mcnallyrobinson.com: McNally Robinson's Espresso Book Machine brews up tasty books on demand]
You may not know this about me -- especially for how well-kept a secret it is -- but I quite like books. The press coverage (see what I did there) plays up the potential for self-publishers, being very careful not to dwell on the concept of vanity publishing, but the additional ability to print off out-of-edition or public domain works means I can finally buy myself a legitimate physical copy of The Sunless City. Just to know I own it, y'know? I'd quite enjoy that.

Not that the ~~vanity~~self-publishing angle isn't interesting as well; a lot of potential for mischief, therein, and I do also quite enjoy mischief.

[West End Dumplings: Celebrating Daniel McIntyre, OBE]
Did you know the full and proper story behind the Daniel McIntyre name? Because, man, I didn't. It probably helps if you're near the area or went to the school, though, I suppose; I lived near the Robert A. Steen Community Centre until I was ten or so, and that one's not really the most rewarding eponym to go back and research years after the fact. "Okay, he got to be the mayor for a couple of years, and then he died unexpectedly of liver cancer. Well, that's... that's something."

Y'know what would be fun? I'd mentioned above how a relatively inexpensive printing press opens worlds of mischievous opportunities; I think it'd be a hoot to gather a committee of people who write well but don't know the histories of Winnipeg's street names and neighbourhoods -- it would not be a difficult committee to staff -- and then have them all make up whatever bullshit sounds the most, or the least, like plausible explanations.

"Vital Justin Grandin (1867 - 1905) was a Winnipeg prizefighter and former Canadian middleweight champion, best remembered for his shocking 1893 upset of reigning four-year champion Miles Macdonell. Grandin capitalized on his sound technical background and patient outfighting approach to wear down the much shorter Macdonell, who was never professionally trained as a boxer but made up for it by being a real ornery son of a bitch. Grandin's cerebral counterpunching, smooth diagonal footwork and unusually pointy head earned him the nickname 'Bishop' from fight fans, a moniker he carried with pride until his sudden death by drowning at the age of thirty-eight. Local landmarks named in his memory include Grandin Street, Bishop Grandin Boulevard and -- owing to the poor hearing of the City cartographer -- Grant Avenue, by mistake."

Then put a reasonably convincing cover on it, print a handful of copies off every so often, and covertly disseminate those copies where they can cause the most consternation. Waiting rooms, used bookstores, charitable-donation fundraiser sales, deep within prize baskets at socials -- however best to spread them around without letting them fall into the hands of people who know better. The Robert A. Steen I know may have done little and died suddenly in his first and only term as Mayor, but the Robert A. Steen other people know can be the province's most infamous privateer, or the fatcat suspender baron whose empire crumbled beneath him after the First World War.

Or, y'know, maybe I have too much time on my hands. Hey, let's move on!

[Google Video: Death By Popcorn - The Tragedy of the Winnipeg Jets]
There are certain advantages to Google Video being the weird and sad abandoned experiment that it is, and one of those advantages is finding interesting and lengthy things uploaded as features during those quote-unquote "competitive" days when YouTube only allowed ten minute uploads. If you've never seen this l'Atelier-National du Manitoba hallucinatory collage of Winnipeg Jets history -- including an interview with Québécois rockers Les Dales Hawerchuk, Wayne Gretzky as the dread destroyer of worlds, funky local commercial intercuts, and the heroic intervention of [spoilers hidden] -- set aside an hour and some alcohol, I think you'll enjoy yourself.

[WITCHPOLICE: The Naked Midgets - Discography (1999-2005)]
Were you just now thinking to yourself about how your day was incomplete because you don't have three full albums of Portage la Prairie punk rock sitting on your computer? Well, cast those worries aside; the steadfast cultural archivists of WITCHPOLICE have you covered.

My personal favourite excerpt from the accompanying writeup by Naked Midgets frontman Jeff Darichuk is that "'Pink Glow Bracelet' and 'Cult Members Are No Fun' both made it to number one on MP3.com." Those were the days! You wouldn't know it now, but that meant something, back in... in... oh, god, I'm old. Oh. Oh, god.

[CTV Winnipeg: Staff at Pembina Highway pet store worried about stolen parrot]
To close out this week's list, what is this I don't even

I don't know if people shoplifting pets is a year-round problem or if it ramps up dramatically come Christmas time, but this kind of story always takes a second to sink into my brain properly. I didn't even know you could take the birds in pet stores out of their cages and play with them, although I guess they'll probably have to put a stop to that now anyway.

So, yes, this is a real thing, a customer at a Petland stuffed a live parrot into her handbag and then sauntered out of the store. A parrot has been shoplifted, and now it is on the news, so if you happen to see a parrot poking out of a bag please be sure to consider that it might be stolen. Know the risks and limitations of purchases made on the parrot black market! Only purchase your parrots from reputable parrot dealers!

This city, man, I don't even know sometimes.

I'll be back in this space before Christmas, I'm sure -- but please be sure to catch tomorrow's Winnipeg Internet Pundits year-end special, and be sure to be back next Tuesday for more ManLinkWeek!

Manitoba Links Weekly: Parcels, Pest Control, Parking, and Plates (ManLinkWeek 9)

2011-12-13T13:00:00.003-06:00

ManLinkWeek, engage!

[Urban Compass (Metro Winnipeg): City services are no bargain]
In today's top story, we hate everything. Surprise! All of the people you re-elected last year have continued to disappoint you.

[The Crime Scene: An (inconclusive) answer to a question that’s always plagued me]
The Winnipeg Police Service and the Manitoba Royal Canadian Mounted Police formally instituted a special warrant squad -- officially the "Manitoba Integrated Warrant Apprehension Unit", which must make answering the phones a real joy -- back in September. And just yesterday the WPS and Manitoba RCMP were pleased to announce that, in those three months since its inception, the MIWAU has successfully arrested over one hundred and fifty loose fugitives and cleared two hundred and twenty-three warrants from the system! This unprecedented progress knocks the number of outstanding warrants down to a paltry... to a mere, uh... twenty thousand warrants remaining. Give or take a couple, here and there, I mean.

James Turner notes here that the 20,000 estimate is basically unchanged in the last five years, which is actually sort of encouraging when you think about it; we left it alone for half a decade and it didn't get any worse? Around here, man, that's basically a victory. And at the current rate of progress with the new Manitoba Integrated Warrant Apprehension Unit -- consisting of six officers and run at an annual cost of $700,000 -- we'll have our backlog of justice cleared out within the next... let me check the ol' calc.exe here... oh, twenty-two and a half years.

Now, this whole endeavour may seem like a massive exercise in futility when you read cases like this one, wherein an elaborate four-year investigation results in a single-year jail sentence, but hey! It's... it's better than nothing, and that counts for something. Am I right, guys?

[Cindy Titus: Thinking of giving a cat as a Christmas gift? Here are some things to consider.]
An acceptable Cliff's Notes answer to this setup question is the word "DON'T", written as largely as possible and then circled ten or fifteen times for emphasis. Because, augh, just please don't do that. It won't end nearly as well as you hope it will.

[Love me, love my Winnipeg: Postmaster]
No real secret -- online shipping charges from the United States to Canada are more often than not, and not to put too fine a point on this, overwhelmingly stupid. "Oh no, wait, you're slightly north of an imaginary line. You will need another FIFTY DOLLARS. And your dollar will be worth five cents less than today's actual exchange rate, for mysterious and entirely unexplained reasons." So here are a few helpful tips on cross-border parcel pickup, if you don't mind a bit of driving or if you tend to drop into the States anyway.

And speaking of driving:

[Manitoba Public Insurance: Registration > Winnipeg Jets Licence Plates]
You will note from the collection of media links here that this, like everything else even tangentially related to our new hockey team, is being covered far more comprehensively than any of our fair city's actual legitimate news stories. Of course.

One thing that particularly caught my eye was the endnote of this Metro Winnipeg article, stating that the reports of stolen Blue Bomber plates were most likely apocryphal because nobody seemed to order any replacements after the fact. I'm curious about that, though; you'll recall, during that summer media flurry of stolen plate reports, that MPI spokesman Brian Smiley told reporters said plates were almost all gone. So if you read that MPI had no more fancy plates, and then somebody stole your fancy plates, would you ask MPI for more fancy plates? I wouldn't rule out that the whole furor was overblown, but I also wouldn't rule out that people were stealing the plates, so... hard to come down conclusively either way, really.

I can tell you this, for sure: my original reaction to the "Fuelled by Passion" slogan remains unchanged, that reaction being "ugh" and a hasty transition to anything else I can find.

HEY LOOK

[RetroWinnipeg YouTube: Winnipeg - Poulin's Pest Control jingle]
I've mentioned this backburner idea of mine to a couple of people before, but if I ever manage to get my hands on a MIDI-capable keyboard and some free time, I want to crank out just the loungiest, Richard-Cheese-iest Winnipeg tribute album ever. Wouldn't that be a hoot? Just ambush the internet one day with a free EP specially designed for dimming the lights, getting bombed on whatever's closest to champagne in the liquor cabinet, and reminiscing with jazz reimaginings of our most peculiar local 'hits'.

"Porrrrr-taaage Plaaaaace! The face of the ciii-ty is chaaan'-gin'! Hey!"

Anyone? No? Okay, well, it's probably a better idea in theory than in practice, but--anyway, if I ever did go ahead with it, this old-timey favourite would be quite likely to sneak onto it somewhere. And the oncoming ten-digit dialing switchover is likely to kill this standard where it stands, so we may as well enjoy it while we can.

[Anybody Want a Peanut?: Derelict Properties Bylaw?]
The biggest problem with surface parking in this city is that it doesn't decay and fall down on itself, meaning it's the one thing we can't solve by neglect. Just our luck.

So please enjoy this fine blog post about our city's continued toothlessness against bylaw infractions, including a profile of one frequent offender, a comments discussion on wacky Google hits, and then finally a big slam on Zellers out of nowhere. Ha! Zellers.

And that's ManLinkWeek for this Tuesday!

Manitoba Links Weekly: All Babies Can Change Lanes During the Race (ManLinkWeek 8)

2011-12-06T08:00:00.004-06:00

Is it? It is! It's ManLinkWeek!

[The Uniter: The Uniter 30]
Behold the Uniter's second annual showcase of 30 Manitoban noteworthies age 30 or younger, following the success of last year's inaugural installment.

Remember when I busted out a Tom Lehrer quotation about feelings of inadequacy a few weeks ago? Just pretend that I didn't quote it then and that I'm quoting it now instead, because reading this year's list (or last year's, for that matter) is a one-way train ticket to feeling like you've wasted every day of your life to this point. Folks my age or younger are winning multiple gold medals for kayaking, raising tens of thousands of dollars to fight AIDS in Swaziland, building the world's largest spiro-spiro-spirograph, and running for leadership of the federal Official Opposition. I can't even find a hoodie I've misplaced, and that's even when I know for a fact it's in this frigging house somewhere. auggghhhhh

I also want to note that one of this year's Uniter 30 just happens to be intrepid Winnipeg Internet Pundits ringleader Tessa Vanderhart, blogger-wrangler extraordinaire and primary reference point of this fine Colin Fast column in yesterday's edition of Metro Winnipeg. Big ups!

Anyway, if all of that was a little too positive for you, let's switch gears to outsiders complaining that we're terrible.

[VICE Magazine: Wondering... Winnipeg's Got Elbow Room]
A Torontonian visits Winnipeg! And, except for the architecture, basically just hates it.

"If you’re still not sold on Winnipeg, did I mention that it has the highest murder rate in Canada, and that there is enough gang violence to compete with certain areas of South Central Los Angeles? It’s not all just quilting bees and cow paths, not by a long shot. In fact, the north end of Winnipeg reminds me a bit of Belfast, Northern Ireland, with its ubiquitous wall murals and the troubles of the First Nations peoples written in the language of the streets."

Oh. Well, hey, good! We're world-class!

[Traveler (The Sydney Morning Herald): Winnipeg tourism | You're going where? Why would you?]
An Australian visits Winnipeg! And, except for Osborne Village, basically just hates it until the locals finally win him over.

"The Canadian customs guy eyed me suspiciously. "You're going where?"

'Winnipeg,' I repeated as nonchalantly as possible. But he wasn't convinced.

'Really? Why?'

'Um - for a holiday.'

He squinted at me for a few more seconds, then finally shrugged his shoulders and stamped my passport. 'Good luck,' he said, sliding the documents over the desk."

We really need to start marketing our... uh... man, I don't know, our unique charm or something. Maybe swipe the old Alexander Keith's slogan and insist that "Those who like it like it a lot"? Something, at least. Something that would keep our own national officials from disbelieving that anybody would visit here of their own volition.

On the other hand, Globe & Mail columnists seem to love us nowadays, and I can't remember the last time I heard of one actually physically dropping by. So maybe our town is just... more charming in theory, although that doesn't really lend itself to tourism slogans either.

[One Man Committee: Green Seed gets set to grow a Bond Tower]
Wait, what is this, what am I looking a--oh my god

BUILD THAT

BUILT IT NOW

friggin

IS IT BUILT YET

WHY ISN'T THIS BUILT YET

[The Manitoban: Manitoba's cougar]
And yes, you wisenheimers, it's about the cat species. I know at least five or six of you were all ready to make the exact same joke, so I'll save you the hassle at the outset.

Manitoba Conservation zoologist Bill Watkins drops some science and some figures throughout on the provincial population of these rare and nomadic creatures, but my favourite information in here is the note near the end that roughly eighty per cent of Manitoba's reported cougar sightings are completely incorrect.

"'People just aren’t as familiar with the flora and fauna of Manitoba as their rural parents and grandparents were, and make mistakes when trying to identify an animal,' Watkins added."

Even if we aren't privy to the breakdown through this article, I dearly hope that the department has been keeping meticulous statistical records of what the hell all these people are confusing for cougars. Like somewhere deep in the file systems of Manitoba Conservation there's a well-protected spreadsheet, carefully detailing and categorizing every idiotic thing they've heard phoned in and had to investigate.

"Stray garbage bag, 39 sightings. Large neighbourhood dog, 27 sightings. Medium-sized neighbourhood dog, 23 sighti--Bill, you're screwing with me on these, right?"

[Winnipeg Bus Stories: Caught on Tape Madness]
These videos are kind of a far cry from this, aren't they? Well, except for that third one.

But guys, seriously, listen. Public transit in this town does not comprise a viable getaway strategy. Even if it did travel fast enough to efficiently remove you from the scene of the crime -- it doesn't, I shouldn't have to tell you this -- most if not all of the Transit fleet have those weird omnipresent ceiling-mounted video cameras on board now. The ones that you can't stop looking at once you've noticed that they're there. Y'ever do that? Just spend your entire bus ride staring directly into the closest security camera, just on the off chance that it'll totally weird out the people monitoring it? No? Huh. Maybe, uh... maybe that's just me.

You'll recall, too, that we'll all be paying an extra quarter per head per trip for the privilege of riding these things next year. That's, uh... that is progress, right?

[Brandon Sun: Babies will take to the ice at Wheat Kings game]
If you are anything like me, you will quickly decide for yourself that the best part of this story -- by far the best part of this story -- is the inclusion of the official ruleset for the Brandon Wheat Kings / Li'l Bit Baby 2011 Diaper Derby.

Parents can coax their children to the finish line! Only two coaches are permitted per baby at the race track! Babies must be from western Manitoba! (They had to add that rule after that one year some bad apple babies from Beausejour rolled in and caused all that trouble. You know how they are.)

I mean, I don't know about you, but I was fully prepared to question the legitimacy of this competition until I saw their commitment to "the rules of the NFL" regarding the finish line. It'd just have been anarchy otherwise! This is what separates us from the animals.

This is the kind of idea you can't just half commit to, either; if you're going to enter your baby into the arena-racing circuit, doesn't it seem like you may as well just dress him in a little jumpsuit with racing stripes on it while you're at it? Or lightning bolts, maybe. And obviously your kid will need a sweet speed-related nickname, like "Flash", or "Hot Rod". Man, I hope somebody gets video of this thing. Especially as evidence for the inevitably hilarious parental conversations in those tumultuous teenage years down the road.

"C'mon, kiddo, go for it, ask her out! She likes you!"
"Aww, Dad--"
"What, you're too shy all of a sudden? That's not how we raised you! We had you competin' in the Arena before you were ten months old!"
"Daa-aaad!"
"And you loved it! Here, lemme go get the videos."

Next Tuesday, more ManLinkWeek! Although, really, we're eight weeks in already, I guess you kind of know the drill by now.

One Billion Dollars of Debt, Managed by Role Models Like These (or: This is Just How Ross Eadie Makes Friends)

2011-12-03T06:55:00.002-06:00

If you listened to the penultimate segment of this past Wednesday's Winnipeg Internet Pundits, you are doubtlessly aware of my unceasing optimism about the City of Winnipeg 2012 Preliminary Capital Budget.

I also wrote this column for Uptown Magazine about the matter, one that speaks for itself rather well, but I'd like to take this time to offer you a couple of quick summaries regardless.

The City of Winnipeg's bargaining position towards the Province of Manitoba, in eleven words:

"This is all your fault. Look what you made me do."

And the Province of Manitoba's bargaining position towards the City of Winnipeg, in just under three minutes:

("You want six dollars for what?")

So this is all very promising, obviously. Why, just take a look at these glowing testimonies from our civic leaders about how well our finances are being handled!

Acting Deputy Mayor, City Councillor, and Executive Policy Committee member Paula Havixbeck:

"It's a mediocre budget, at best."

City Councillor Jenny Gerbasi:

"We're at a wall financially and I don't see any solutions in this budget."

"We have limited funds, we can't do it all but yet we're doing what's not necessarily the highest priorities. [. . .] Chief Peguis Trail and the Plessis underpass are things that should not have come before other things including our existing infrastructure and rapid transit."

City Councillor, Executive Policy Committee member, and Public Works Committee Chair Dan Vandal:

"We're near the max of our borrowing. Unless we get new revenue streams to pay for the interest charges [. . .] we're in a tough fix."

"It's horrible, actually. We're not getting ahead of the problem. We're always losing ground to the infrastructure deficit."

And, of course, our fearless Captain Visionary himself, Mayor Sam Katz:

"We need improvements all over the place. We need a stable, predictable and long-term source of revenue to deal with this."

"As opposed to addressing this as quickly as we can, we’re putting our finger in the dike. What we need to do is identify a long-term source of revenue, because once we do that we could plan long-term on how to fix it."

Absolutely! Absolutely! If there's one set of steps that I very firmly believe in, it's:

1) borrow the absolute maximum that your existing credit limit will allow
2) figure out how you're going to find the money to pay for things

And that's the kind of logical, rational fiscal thinking that has made me what I am today! Broke!

So every man, woman and child living in the City of Winnipeg will each personally -- per capita, if you will -- owe around $1500 by the end of 2014 and just over $1600 by the end of 2015, working out to around a billion large in 2014 and well over a billion in 2015. But! But. Not to worry!

Perhaps ten digits' worth of debt would be a concern in cities with less upstanding leadership -- yes, perhaps so -- but here in Wonderful Winnipeg, where all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, such fears are wildly unfounded. We as a city have the fine fortune to be led by men and women of character and class, governed as we are by a tightly-knit cabal of level-headed wisdom-lovers who band together to act with grace and dignity at all times through trials and tribulations large and small.

In fact, it would appear I have an email in my inbox passed along from those very same Councillors right now! Let me just have a look here, let me just crack this open. Subject line "how did you vote" -- how nice! I'm glad they take such interest in each other's...

In each... in...

Oh.

~~~~

From: Eadie, Ross
Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2011 10:14 AM
To: Pagtakhan, Mike; Wyatt, Russ; Havixbeck, Paula; Browaty, Jeff
Subject: how did you vote

So this is how people treat someone who is not trying to be the typical politician. This move deeply hurts me

Mike, if you voted for this fucking crap, you are not going to like Community Committee any more. Nobody fucks with my home. I have a definition of density that says no fucking multifamily structures mid block. If this fucking project was at the corner of a feeder street and Scotia, it might be okay with a proper design.

Rus you are just a fucking asshole. Your pal could have made lots of fucking money without this crap. I knew you would pull this shit when you lied to me about Jenny.

Jeff, how would you feel about [pulling this shit on Kildonan Drive?

Paula, not sure how you voted, but how would you feel if this crap was pulled on you?

Ross Eadie
City Councillor
Mynarski Ward
Tel. (204) 986-5188
Cell: (204) 391-6259
E-mail: ReadIE@winnipeg.ca

“Ross listens.”

~~~~

okay, uh

hang on, give me a second

Okay. Well. This... this isn't all bad.

A mere misunderstanding, really! Eadie insists that "F-sharp is used all the time" and "There's nothing the matter with what I said", adding that "Councillors swear all the time in closed-door meetings". There, you see? He's just trying to fit in! He's new around here, guys, you should know to cut him a bit of slack. He thought this is just what Councillors do!

Besides, a rookie mistake like this is easy to work around; this message was only sent to four people, and all four of those people are professionals who can be counted upon to handle such inflammatory and accusatory matters with the necessary discretion and tact befitting their positions. So I'm sure that this will just be a non-issue, handled internally, and everyone involved will be able to--

~~~~

From: Pagtakhan, Mike
Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2011 10:25 AM
To: Nordman, Grant
Subject: FW: how did you vote

Mr. Speaker, for your information....I don't think profanity ought to be tolerated like this.

Mike Pagtakhan, BA, CIM, CPP
City Councillor - Point Douglas Ward
510 Main Street
Winnipeg, MB R3B 1B9
204.986.8401
mpagtakhan@winnipeg.ca

~~~~

...you... you tattletaled on him? Is City Council secretly just third grade?

And then one of you leaked the emails to the press, ensuring not only that Ross Eadie would look like an antisocial NIMBYite but also that Russ Wyatt would look like the scummiest scumbag in the long and storied history of bagging scum?

Okay. Just, just hang on on a second. This... this will all be fine! We still have the cool head and firm hand of our Mayor and his Executive Policy Committee, including the esteemed Councillor Browaty mentioned by name in the email. Both are sure to bring the sensibility and perspective that this issue needs, and once they weigh in to expertly defuse the matter it'll all be--

~~~~

Katz told the Winnipeg Sun that provincial inspectors are poised to examine the message after being informed of it by civic human resources staff.

"It’s almost as though they were being threatened, if you interpret that," Katz said Wednesday. "That’s probably the bigger issue."

[. . .]

"Language is one thing. But the personal threat, I think, is probably the more significant piece of it," said Browaty, the property committee’s chairman."

~~~~

Oh! The... the personal threat. The threat, upon your person. No, no, of course! Given his intimidating physical stature and his long record of previous violent convictions, it seems only natural to expect that his online belligerence will shortly transition to an inevitable onslaught of horrific personal assaults that--HE'S BLIND, YOU TOOLS

COME ON

"Personal threat", what the hell is this. Like he's actually the white Colonel Stinkmeaner and he's going to bust your kneecaps with his cane the second you get anywhere near him, unless you call in the province first to protect you from his wrath. Nobody running our city has the character to stand up face-to-face against a blind man acting impolitely. This... that's real inspiring, fellas.

To recap. Here is what we have learned from this little adventure:

City Councillor Ross Eadie curses like a newly-peglegged pirate if you build a two-story building down the street from his house, and his definition of "density" bears no conceivable resemblance to actual density.
City Councillor Mike Pagtakhan beelines to the first authority figure available to tell on someone if he hears them say a swear, which as we all know is the commonly accepted procedure for profanity in and around Point Douglas.
City Councillor Russ Wyatt -- and this wasn't even supposed to be on public record, this is what other councillors say about him when they think it'll be off the record -- Russ Wyatt rigs the system to funnel money to his friends, lies to co-workers about other co-workers, and is apparently just entirely unpleasant to be around. (Bearing in mind the source of this information, of course.)
City Councillor Jenny Gerbasi -- who, if you trust the word of our Mayor, only acts the way she does because she's "looking for attention or love" -- is far enough out of the loop to be completely unaware when people are talking shit about her behind her back. (I love the mental picture of everybody sitting in council when the news report pops into their RSS feeds, Gerbasi slowly looking over at Wyatt after reading it, and Wyatt making a cartoon "Gulp!" noise.)
Eadie's frustrated damnation of the entire electoral system -- "this is why people don't vote" -- does nothing to support his ideological ally, newly-elected City Councillor Brian Mayes, who won his seat in a by-election with 20% turnout.
And our Mayor, who I am confident acted swiftly and decisively to address the situation as soon as he got off the plane from Phoenix and his staff handed him the newspapers, can be counted on to mistake the frustrated cuss words of a disappointed neighbourhood landowner as the vengeful personal threats of a violent and maniacal street brawler.

These are the people that we decided were responsible and mature enough to handle our money for us, and on the strength of their decision-making skills we will owe a billion dollars within the next three to four years without having solved any of our existing problems. Everything is terrible. There's your local news.

There is nothing I could say about any of this that would improve morale at all, so here is a video of a Corgi puppy running through a field.

Until next time, true believers!

Manitoba Links Weekly: It Scares Us Too (ManLinkWeek 7)

2011-11-29T13:00:00.002-06:00

If you'd happened to wonder, here is what Highway 8 looked like on our warmest November 24th in history:

Knowing full well that it's nine degrees out, but still having to try and outrace the sun before it drops at 4:30 PM? Weird feeling, man.

The sandbag walls along southwestern Lake Winnipeg appear to be undisturbed thus far, though, so you know what? I'll take it.

On to ManLinkWeek!

[Winnipeg Internet Pundits: Nov. 23: Crime Time]
Everyone in the studio agreed afterwards that this was among our best shows thus far, possibly the best; with three stellar guests and a full complement of timely crime topics, I'm sure you'll find this to be an insightful and informative hour's worth of content.

What else went on last week? Ah, yes:

[k*sara in real life: bloggers* round 2]
Damn, but I'm handsome. I totally threw off the height balance of the panel, though, which is my bad.

I'd meant to run this as its own post, and I probably still will once I can get a bit of downtime to do so, but many thanks to Kenton Larsen for having me back in to participate in a second(!) CreComm Blogger Roundtable alongside other fine local bloggers. This was the second time in as many sessions that an hour went by like absolutely nothing, and the students had so many excellent questions that there are probably still a lot left to answer, so remind me to get back to this and hopefully help the new generation of internet superstars do better than my dumb ass did for the first few years.

[The View from Seven: Reflections of a 94 percenter]
Did you vote in the School Trustee election this past Saturday? Ha ha ha ha, no you didn't, who are we kidding. Barely anybody did! So Kevin McDougald takes up the case to investigate the motivation, or lack thereof, and the compelling factors, or lack thereof, behind the continued plummet of voter participation.

[Policing, Politics and Public Policy: Winnipeg Police Crimestat Maps Offer a Distorted View of Crime]
oh for god's sakes, does this thing do anything right

[Brandon Sun: Big effing deal]
The dust having finally settled from the usual hullabaloo of Pat Martin being Pat Martin, Brandon Sun online coordinator and Absurd Intellectual webmaster Grant Hamilton provides the reader with this profanity postscript in a fine bit of Canadian media studies.

Just write "fuck", you guys, come on. The Canadian Press Stylebook says to just write "fuck". I assure you, we can handle it.

[New Media Manitoba: Job Board: Hiring a Market Access Officer]
"The official job we're hiring for is 'Market Access Officer' but that's just another way of saying 'partner extraordinaire,' which is another way of saying 'expert networker,' which is another way of saying 'business genius,' which is another way of saying please take the time to read through and distribute this job posting across your networks locally and abroad."

That... that clears it up. Thank you.

[RetroWinnipeg YouTube: Winnipeg - Contemporary Dancers commercial (1989)]
GAH

AAAH

AAAAAAAAAHHHH

AAH

Thank you for reading ManLinkWeek!

Manitoba Links Weekly: Everything is Terrible, There's Your Local News (ManLinkWeek 6)

2011-11-22T11:00:00.003-06:00

We're proud of the ManLinkWeek name!
So proud of its glory and fame--

[Markosun's Blog: Winnipeg Blue Bombers fight song circa 1970's]
The continued problem of working around the lyric "We're best in the West" is probably why you don't hear this tune played too often any more, it being a difficult task to squeeze "except for those years when Ottawa fails to support a team, during which time we quote-unquote 'move' to the East for the sake of league parity" into the song structure.

I noted also in listening to it that it sounds to be a newer version of the first song you hear on this album -- meaning I have no idea how old the song actually is, since the excerpts on that album were undated.

I've gleamed from a bit of online inquiry that this particular recording of the track -- very much in the style of the times -- is an arrangement by Canadian big-band director Dal Richards for the 1968 album "Canadian Football Songs", which you can listen to in its entirety here. (96kbps MP3, granted, but c'mon -- what were you expecting, FLAC?)

If you gain nothing else from today's post, at least now you know more about the Blue Bombers' fight song (officially titled "Bombers' Victory March") than you did when you woke up this morning. Also, the Riders' fight song was stolen from Wisconsin. JUST THROWING THAT OUT THERE

[West End Dumplings: Great Winnipeg Stadium Moments: Construction (1953)]
Sunday's CFL Eastern Final also marked the last significant use of Winnipeg Stadium (officially "Canad Inns Stadium" in its final years, but that's all behind us now), triggering the inevitable mental switchover between referring to it as "the current stadium" and referring to it as "the previous stadium". So here's everything you ever wanted to know about the previous stadium but were afraid to ask, more specifically a link to the opening post of (fellow Winnipeg Internet Pundit) Christian Cassidy's eight(!)-part series on the history of the venue.

[David A. Wyatt's All-Time List of Canadian Transit Systems: Winnipeg Transit and Osborne Junction (Confusion Corner)]
Speaking of sweeping historical research initiatives, this page is part of a broader project to profile the evolution of transit systems across the country, which is a crazy impressive scope to behold. I honestly never had any idea that Gladstone School ever actually existed, for how rarely it's mentioned and how long before my time it was demolished. And, wow, few things are as discouraging as realizing that north Pembina looks almost exactly the same as it did fifty years ago. Jump in any time, developers!

[Uptown Magazine: Friends of the... Public Safety Building?]
Last week was hectic enough that I'd even neglected to plug my own column, an oversight I will sheepishly rectify this week. But guys, seriously, we need to figure out what we're doing with this thing; you will get absolutely no sympathy from me if the first I hear about this problem is slightly ahead of the police moving to their new building. How delayed does this really have to be? If we want to save it, let's decide we're saving it; if we want to knock it down, let's make arrangements to knock it down; if we want to sell it, we should be going balls to the wall to find a buyer as we speak. Keep in mind this is a city that has previously listed property with its favourite realtor nine months before council agreed it should be sold, so this whole thing would be long since solved by now if anyone were genuinely interested in getting it done.

[Anybody Want A Peanut?: Winnipeg Police Service Strategic Plan]
The police department's Strategic Plan through 2014 dropped this past Friday, to generally tepid public reaction. This cherenkov post on the matter gets in the best zinger of the week with the printer crack, but also notes as an aside that -- with our continued expansion of land use relative to our teensy population growth rate -- the city is actively losing population density every year.

[Christopher Leo: The price Winnipeg pays for subsidizing new roads]
And we've bankrupted ourselves by building outwards. So there's that. It's going real well, around here.

"Although it is claimed the city can’t afford to fix the old roads, there is always money available for new roads. And that is the nub of the problem."

It doesn't help that our old-ass water pipes are exploding again, either. The best that any of us can hope to do at this point is bombard Justin Swandel with subliminal messaging about consolidating development into the core, so that one morning he'll wake up believing it was his idea and then it'll be official city policy by noon that day.

god, this city

[CookBook Adventures: Bannock Step By Step]
To end on something that doesn't make me want to throttle somebody, here's a helpful tutorial for traditional local fare if you feel like getting your Voyageur on early. The more traditional written recipe is here, but the step-by-step photo tutorial is way more helpful for schlubs like me whose most successful baking attempts were with 40-watt bulbs.

Tune in next time for more ManLinkWeek!

Manitoba Links Weekly: You Must Believe that You're the Champion (ManLinkWeek 5)

2011-11-15T11:00:00.003-06:00

I keep meaning to do posts other than these, but in the meantime, let's have ourselves another ManLinkWeek:

[CBC.ca: Winnipeg breaks homicide record with 35th death]
Welp, there it is, then. That's the kind of year it's been, around here, that we'd break the city's previous annual record for homicides by the midpoint of November.

Winnipeg may or may not be officially recrowned as the Murder Capital of Canada next year, owing to the measurement methodology employed on the subject by Statistics Canada, but the balance and the difference between homicide rate and homicide count kind of muddle the whole point. Thunder Bay was considered the Murder Capital for 2010 with a omicide rate of 4.2 homicides per 100,000 people, comparative to Winnipeg's rate of 2.8 homicides per 100,000 people, but the total homicide count in Thunder Bay last year was five. The current Murder Capital of Canada had as many homicides last year as Winnipeg had in one fire this year. It's not been a good year, around here.

My point is this: we like to make a big deal of the comparative numbers each year and each time they're released, but we should probably worry less about how Winnipeg measures nationally and worry more that our city has now recorded more homicides this year than in any other year, in history, ever.

[The View from Seven: Fixing “Under-Educated Manitoba” could help ensure that Jets, Ikea are here to stay]
And we're stupid. So, I mean, things could be going better.

An insightful piece of research and analysis from Kevin McDougald on the benefits of working smarter rather than working harder, which is a continued challenge for a province that has "traditionally been better at producing high school dropouts than scientists".

The article places a particular emphasis on the value of the sciences, but really, I don't think it will come as any particular revelation to the reader that a Science degree makes you vastly more employable and wealthy than an Arts degree will. You can't just get any old degree! I myself have a Double Honours Bachelor's in History and Political Studies and a Master's of Library and Information Science, and this unique combination of education and experience -- credentials earned by over half a decade of hard work, with knowledge and skills forged by years of toil and sacrifice under tens of thousands of dollars of debt -- has brought me what I have today: part-time night work at the Pembina Hotel beer vendor. Just... just go into the sciences, kids, just trust me on this one.

As bad as things may be, of course, there's always a bright side:

"In the 2006 census, we ranked 10th among the 13 provinces and territories in terms of the percentage of 25 to 64 year olds with post-secondary credentials in any form, whether it be a college diploma, university degree or a trades designation.

"Only Saskatchewan, New Brunswick and Nunavut ranked worse."

YEAHHHHH WE BEAT SASKATCHEWAN

HA HA HA HEY SASKABUSH WHAT UP

[The Masks We All Wear: Hackers Anonymous (SkullSpace)]
My doom-and-glooming aside, not all is lost on the regional brainpower front; newly-established local hackerspace SkullSpace Winnipeg celebrated its grand opening earlier this month, and this on-site report from CreComm student Justin Luschinski adds the helpful reminder that picking a lock in real life is far more complicated than Skyrim would have you believe.

There are people around town building fully-functional hovercrafts in their basements, and if you don't think that's awesome, I don't know what to tell you. (To borrow one of my favourite Tom Lehrer quotes: "it's people like that that remind you how little you've accomplished.")

[Sean Carney's Website: How about them Jets, Mr. Speaker?]
This Hansard excerpt isn't the first time that the provincial NDP have invoked our National Hockey League representation in the Legislature, but it is thus far the funniest. I also enjoy that the reaction of Speaker of the House Daryl Reid is basically just "yeah yeah, awright, you made your point, g'wan get out of here."

[Winnipeg Free Press: Santa gets stuck in Winnipeg parade]
What Staff Writer declined to note in this story about the Santa Claus Parade failing to get Santa to The Forks properly is that... I don't think they've ever managed to get Santa to The Forks properly.

I know they couldn't pull it off in 2006, I'm told they couldn't pull it off in 2009, and I remember at least one other year having a mini-flurry of news stories after the fact about the lack of Santa in the Santa Claus parade by the time it got off Main. (Both of our major papers have since completely revamped their web architecture, so the hell if anyone knows where anything is any more.) But what can they do? The Santa at the end is the only Santa allowed in the parade, so he has to have a huge float to instill the necessary presence, but then they can never get it to fit under the bridge. Curse our antiquated civic infrastructure!

[Kijiji Winnipeg: Wanted: Winnipeg Sun - May 18, 1995]
Well, fortunately I carry two copies of that specific issue on my person at all times, so I'm sure I could--no, okay, seriously, what is this.

My favourite detail is the placement stressing that it has to be an "original", like all he can ever find on eBay are the reproductions and it just pisses him off every time. It's also fun to imagine the reasoning behind why it has to be that exact edition, including:

-- copy editor from 1995 still paranoid he left an 'r' off of 'embarrassment' on page six
-- cognitively unable to handle happiness for Jets' return; need depressing old headlines around to feel normal again
-- inherited complete collections of April and June 1995 Winnipeg Suns, and at that point you may as well just fill in the gaps
-- Black-o-rama Reggae Festival coverage especially well done that year
-- through elaborate series of wacky sitcom contrivances, accidentally spilled coffee on attractive neighbour's prized copy of May 18th, 1995 Winnipeg Sun while housesitting
-- contains fascinating article about this new information superhighway thing
-- wife was the Sun Girl for May 18th, 1995; intended divorce court strategy to "expose that bitch" about to backfire spectacularly
-- somebody wants that newspaper because that was the day they were born, and oh god i just realized how old i am jesus christ

[WITCHPOLICE: Time Travel: Various - Ska is Back in Town]
(cached version, if that link isn't working)
We'll close this out on a high note with this vintage little A1 Records compilation; it has a couple of fun tracks on it, but I am linking this almost solely for the free downloadable MP3 of Gregory Kraj's "Champion Reggae" because that song makes pretty well anything better.

"If you want to be a champion! You must believe that you're the champion!"

Next Tuesday, more ManLinkWeek!

Manitoba Links Weekly: We Got Roads Ahead (ManLinkWeek 4)

2011-11-08T10:00:00.000-06:00

I'm still experimenting with post themes and post times for this segment, so let's jump right in with week four:

[bigsugar.com: REVOLUTION PER MINUTE fall NATIONAL TOUR dates announced.]
Very few things in the big wide world warm the cynical cockles of my heart quite like the knowledge -- the very idea -- that Big Sugar and Wide Mouth Mason both have new albums and are touring the country together in the year 2011. The tour rolls through ~~the Walker~~ dammit the Burton Cummings Theatre for the Performing Arts this Thursday (and through The 40 in Brandon tomorrow night, if that's closer for you); I've already bought my ticket, and inner fourteen-year-old me is totally stoked about getting to go to this.

If I had my way -- reference, uh, unintentional -- if I had my way, these guys would staple this list to the wall and then hurl darts at it until they had enough bands together for a great big Can-rock summer tour. Not infeasible! Big Sugar, Wide Mouth Mason, the Watchmen, Econoline Crush and the Tea Party are all currently reunited; the Tragically Hip never actually stopped; Matthew Good was literally just through town yesterday. Somebody throw money at David Usher until Moist emerges, everybody agree to dedicate the tour to Dan Achen, and let's put on the best cross-Canadian tour ever! And, while I'm dreaming, I'd like a rocketship.

sigh

[The British North American Blog: Winnipeg street plan driver’s nightmare and developer’s dream]
"Do people complain that we need an underpass at Waverley? Or do they complain that we need to extend the Charleswood Bridge all the way to Bishop Grandin? I bet if you asked a thousand people to choose you would get a thousand 'what a stupid question' looks before being pummelled in the head. Underpass Underpass Underpass."

Following the recent unveiling of the City of Winnipeg's Master Transportation Plan, suffice it to say that nobody's much impressed. (Ditto for the city's short-term transit plans, too.)

[One Man Committee: You can't get there from YWG (at least not directly)]
Remember how everybody had a good laugh when Barry Rempel tried to convince money-savvy Winnipeggers that flying out of Winnipeg was every bit as inexpensive as flying out of Grand Forks? Oh, man, those were good times. (They've since deleted the comments thread on that story, which is really too bad, because dang if the public reactions to that claim weren't amazing.)

But even if Winnipeg could hypothetically close the price gap, through some combined miracles of fare competitions and wildly beneficial exchange rates, this fine Walter Krawec post reminds us that there'd still be the problem of actually getting anywhere efficiently from our airport. Ahh, it's always something, I guess.

Interesting sidenote: the front page of the Grand Forks International Airport website boasts that "GFK is proud be the closest U.S. international airport to Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada." How odd must that proclamation look to anybody from anywhere else?

[Google Maps: Brandon Beer]
You know how it is, sometimes: you find yourself in an unfamiliar locale, and you don't really know where you're going or where anything is, but you have a dire and urgent need of beer. Hey, it happens! So if such a scenario should strike while you're in or around Brandon, this recent geolocational initiative of The Cranky Beer Blogger will have your back.

[Winnipeg Free Press: Gang war hits ticket revenue]
This is a real thing: according to Winnipeg Police Service Chief Keith McCaskill, the police department is $1.4 million short on its financial statement for the year because gang activity and violent crime in the summer meant they couldn't have enough police issuing traffic tickets. The city was very, very much counting on these tickets being issued, having predicated its overall budget on the expectation of continuous traffic revenue, so this unforeseen circumstance -- "reduced resources for traffic-ticket enforcement", the continued inconvenience of having to deploy police officers for crimes rather than infractions -- directly caused a quarter of our civic deficit for the year.

To recap, keeping people safe from violent crime isn't as lucrative as sitting in a van on Bishop Grandin, so the police chief had to go to city council and explain why he doesn't have the money they wanted. Well, we have to have our priorities, after all; what good is public safety if it isn't profitable? What kind of world do we even live in when the new cops we hired aren't paying for themselves? Knowing our city, the solution is obvious: we must hire more cops.

[Love me, love my Winnipeg: One stop shopping?]
The reactionary NIMBYism of Winnipeggers is so overwhelmingly powerful that people don't even want 7-Elevens in their neighbourhood, and that's in a city that prides itself on its Slurpee consumption.

(I'm not entirely sure which section of that last sentence is the worst part.)

But it bears mention that these assorted Slurpee stations, new and old, may also soon become the cheapest and most convenient way to rent (physical copies of) recent DVD releases -- especially since everywhere in town that used to be a Blockbuster location is now either a fitness centre or a "leasing opportunity".

[RetroWinnipeg YouTube: Valu Rent a Car commercial (1984)]
I tell you what: every time I watch this, every single time, the third guy playing the butler cracks me up with his maniacal cartoon villain laughter at the very end. Nothing against David Keam and "You'll find us!", but holy hell, local commercials used to be amazing.

"When you're stars, image is everything!"
"nyehhehhehhehhehhehheh"
"hyeh ha ha ha"
"PAH HAH HAH HAH HAH"

And that's your ManLinkWeek!

Manitoba Links Weekly: Always So Good for So Litt--[Signal Out of Range] (ManLinkWeek 3)

2011-11-01T07:00:00.003-05:00

It's been another big week, so let's open with the most time-sensitive information:

[Information Tsunami: Ambassador Gary Doer, streaming Nov. 1]
If you don't have anything down in your day planner for 10:00 this morning, you are invited to watch a live stream of ~~Premi~~ dammit Ambassador Gary Doer speaking to Creative Communications students at Red River College. What about, I have no idea; it could be "Brain Drain is Awesome: How to Get Out of This Province", for all I know. You know you'd watch that, too, don't pretend like you wouldn't.

I don't know what Doer's itinerary is for the rest of the day, but maybe after the speech he'll drop by the Legislature and it'll be really awkward. That'd be amazing, wouldn't it? Like Selinger stands beside him to shake his hand, starts to lean in for a half-hug, Doer glares at him and shakes his head 'no', and then they just keep shaking hands painstakingly slowly.

if i lapse into longform fanfiction i need you to promise you'll shoot me

[CBC.ca Player: Winnipeg's air terminal opens (1964) (via West End Dumplings)]
"Modern facilities required by the Air Age are housed in this new, 13-million-dollar terminal project."

Everything old was new, once, so get a load of this: twelve minutes of black and white (!) documentary-slash-promotional footage for our then-new, now-abandoned Airport terminal, with persuasive narration and bursts of swank 1960s production music and everything.

Jump to about 8:45 in for some hilariously baffled patron reactions to the modern art ("It's god-awful." "I don't know what it's... supposed to represent.") and the narrator's chuckling transition of "Whatever your taste in art, it... calls for a drink." Really, just watch the whole thing straight through, it is pretty fantastic.

"Thirteen million dollars is a lot of money... but it's given us something to be proud of. A thing of beauty as well as utility. In a way, I suppose it's also given us a better stake in the future. We'll get used to the modern art in time, I guess."

lol nope

[Urban Compass by Colin Fast (Metro Winnipeg): Welcome to the ’peg: watch your back]
As I'm sure you've noticed several times before, we as a city and as a province distract very, very easily; we are Dug the Talking Dog, and the police helicopter is our squirrel.

Our once and future Policy Frog combines the unveiling of the new Airport and a nearly-simultaneous shooting death on McPhillips to call out our leaders, of all stripes and styles, who prefer "random acts of publicity" to the actual hard and dirty work of pursuing and implementing lasting solutions.

And he's right! Local politicians and authorities will continue in perpetuity to roll out any cynical lipservice they can afford, unless we hold them to account, and the time is now for we the common people to rise up and--SWISS CHALET

[Observations, Reservations, Conversations: Swiss Chalet Now Open in Winnipeg]
I used to date a girl in Ontario whose absolute favourite thing to eat was Swiss Chalet, whose favourite luxury was ordering it online and having thirteen-dollar chicken delivered right to her door, so I am qualified to tell you that affection for Swiss Chalet is not necessarily a regional quirk; it is not necessarily a Winnipeg thing, nor is it necessarily an Ontario thing. Definitely a white people thing, though! White people love Swiss Chalet, oh man, that shit is white people catnip. Hold the little container of that weird sauce near the carpet and they roll over for it, it's great.

John Dobbin -- incidentally a guest on this week's Winnipeg Internet Pundits! -- notes in a later update that "no other post I have written has ever come close to matching Swiss Chalet for traffic", and reports indicate that the store has been consistently slammed since its opening. Between this and our collective civic post-Jets afterglow, there are probably a lot of people figuring we can bring back anything and everything we used to have back in the day; the Occupy Winnipeg encampment will be infiltrated and then eventually overtaken by signs like "WE WANT CONSUMERS DISTRIBUTING" and "BRING BACK GRAPES", assuming this hasn't happened already.

[AlysonShane.com: Let's get serious for a moment]
For a city that so desperately declares itself 'world-class', holy smokes, are we ever bad at things like wireless hotspots. You can walk around other cities with a Nintendo DS and get better internet access than our computers get here, our town still about a decade behind on the whole idea of it actually being the 21st century.

Remember when our Mayor made a campaign promise to establish a downtown-wide Wi-Fi network? In 2006? It's going real well, so far!

Ahhhh, I shouldn't pick on the guy too much, though; he may be the third least popular Mayor in Canada, but he does have his supporters, like--

[Winnipeg Sun: Who is the real Sam Katz?]
--wait, what

Okay, did Sam Katz stonewall a Sun TV interview request, or what is this? Did Metro Winnipeg land a plum Goldeyes sponsorship deal? Did he run over Laurie Mustard's dog?

Katz is the same Katz he's ever been, the same kind of guy making the same kind of decisions with the same kind of mental processes -- but last year the Sun assured us he was "the mayor Winnipeg needs" who "can be depended upon to keep the city gradually moving forward" and "can also be trusted to keep his word when it comes to freezing property taxes for at least one more year", and now this year they think he's a promise-breaking disappointment scumbag poop.

The headlines within the span of a year have literally -- literally -- gone from "Winnipeg's Caped Crusader" to "Katz, you're no hero". He's the same guy he was before, Sun dudes, I don't know what to tell you.

Okay, seriously, though, what did he do? Did he shoot a cop? He shot a cop, didn't he.

[Upper Deck Blog: Upper Deck Celebrates the Return of the NHL in Winnipeg with a Special Jets Set]
Hockey card collectors, traders and prospectors converging on Winkler Video and Thompson Book Nook? It's more likely than you think!

After all the chaos of uprooting and replanting a hockey franchise, particularly the delays in jersey design and related merchandise, it appears that sports fans will be able to get hockey cards of the Jets in uniform after all. Not of all the Jets, mind you, and not inexpensively; the article mentions buying "select amount of 2011-12 Upper Deck NHL packs" to get three Jets cards, and their declining to specify the amount of packs indicates it'll probably be a fair number of packs.

The front designs of all fifteen cards are included in the link above, and one of the cards in this "special 15-card set of current Jets players" is Mark Scheifele, who was reassigned to the Barrie Colts last week. So, uh... whoops. Is there such a thing as a pre-rookie card?

Mind you, though -- the Phoenix Coyotes have banned pressbox photography after the media kept taking embarrassing shots of the mostly empty arena during games, so I suppose there are worse problems to have than a limited availability of player cards. Right? Right.

So on that cheery note -- see you next time for more ManLinkWeek!

Manitoba Links Weekly: Exploring the Past (ManLinkWeek 2)

2011-10-25T07:00:00.009-05:00

By the time you read this I will be in Oak Lake, between Virden and Brandon and far enough away that the grocery store maintains a full selection of Roughriders merchandise. Starting a weekly feature the week before I wouldn't be here was kind of a dumb idea, in retrospect, but I think you'll find plenty to enjoy in these links regardless.

[Community of Oak Lake: Did You Know Oak Lake Centennial Feature]
"Our first Mayor was Robin Hood! Then he drowned, childless, at the age of 45." These and other cheerfully poignant, quietly unsettling small town facts await you!

[Kert Gartner: 1960s Winnipeg Life on 8mm Film]
Oh, wow, this. Local photographer and animator Kert Gartner spent an entire weekend digitally transferring piles and piles of his grandparents' old 8mm reels, and basically it's all amazing, so be prepared to drop some serious viewing time into this and his accompanying YouTube account. The 1969 Winnipeg Santa Claus Parade? Twenty-four minutes of The Pas in 1970? Forty-year-old Red River Ex footage? Bring it on.

[Markosun's Blog: Russian language map of Canada]
This is tremendous by itself -- a little bigger and it would have made terrific desktop wallpaper -- but it's infinitely more fascinating if you're the type to daydream about science fiction or alternate histories. And I would totally buy from a line of "Виннипег" shirts, I won't lie to you and pretend that I wouldn't. (What's the Russian for "One Great City"?)

[winnipegzombies YouTube: Undead Fire Performers (2011 Winnipeg Zombie Walk)]
undead are weak against fire, this is bullshit
The "BRAINS! BRAINS!" chant about three minutes in, taken together with the drum music and the wide circle of people and the sporadic bursts of fire, must have been a real hoot if any passersby were unaware that the Zombie Walk was that night.

[Uptown Magazine: Intra-Winnipeggian Tourism]
Yo, it's my feature, I get self-promotional perks. You ever notice how little we know or hear about the less-discussed neighbourhoods of our fair city? New development is only covered when it happens downtown or in the southern reaches of town, and older neighbourhoods are only mentioned when someone gets shot in them, so entire giant segments of the city are complete mysteries to a lot of people. Everything east of Main or St. Anne's is just the Mint and some French people, and anything north of Portage is just hey guess what you're dead. Alas.

[Twitter: Fake MLCC (likkermart)]
"Get 15 Air Miles when you buy a bottle of Some Wine You Never Heard Of. Limited time only."
"Even though we put up signs about being undrunk, we still want you to get shittttttaaaay!"
"We are pleased to announce we have some new beers. We're just not sure what, or where it is."
If you Twitter-follow one parody account of a Crown Corporation this month, make it the plastic-bottled ersatz publicity machine of our provincial hooch monopoly.

[scottbathgate.com: WELCOME TO SCOTT-BATHGATE LTD. HOME OF NUTTY CLUB & FOOD CLUB PRODUCTS]
I know I brought this up on Winnipeg Cat last year, but holy shit, get a load of that. Somehow, out of all the links this week, this one just feels like it's the oldest, and at the same time feels like somebody laced the Nutty Club raspberry drops with peyote and then fed them to an Angelfire site.

That's it for this week's installment; I'll be back in town tomorrow afternoon for Winnipeg Internet Pundits, and I'll have more ManLinkWeek for you same time next week!

Crazy Terry's Used Car Capital

2011-10-23T08:44:00.002-05:00

So, this news story came up a day or two ago. Wacky, right? Read that again, let that turn of affairs sink into your brain for a minute.

Terry Nelson's reign in Roseau River had its fair share of controversy, Nelson being something of a regionally-renowned shit disturber, but his long and tumultuous Chiefdom came to its conclusion when he was forced out by the First Nation's custom council last month and his permanent replacement elected a week and a half ago.

Terry Nelson isn't the type of guy to let a little thing like impeachment get him down, though; now he's free to pursue his other interests, like... securing a ten-million-dollar line of credit, setting up shop at the outskirts of town, and working with car dealers to shore up a fleet of used vehicles with satellite-tracked immobilizers in them. Hey, career advancement is in the eye of the beholder, right?

So I for one wish him all the best in his future endeavors, and I for one am looking forward to seeing how this all plays out. I can only imagine -- I can only imagine what the television commercials will be like...

Crazy Terry's Used Car Capital on Highway 6 is clearing house all this month, and we're passing the savings on to you!

Bad credit? No credit? No problem! This 1985 Pontiac Parisienne can be yours, for only thirty-nine-ninety-five! Zero per cent financing available, no money down.

I used to argue for treaty rights, but now I'm agreeing to treat you right! This 1994 Chevrolet Cavalier, brown and grey with all its original doors, only fifty-nine-ninety-five!

And, brothers and sisters, it is still the same: the white man wants to control us. Well, control is just what you'll get from this '89 Oldsmobile, a Cutlass Ciera, ninety-nine-ninety-five. And every finance package comes with a gas voucher! This $20 value, absolutely free, all this month at Crazy Terry's Used Car Capital.

Let me tell you, folks, there's only one way to deal with a white man: you either pick up a gun, or you stand between him and his money. But why stand when you can relax in style? This 1992 Buick Roadmaster, original wood paneling, yours for only sixty-nine-ninety-five! And we'll match any competitors' financing offer; I have no intention of letting anyone, Jew or otherwise, give you a better deal.

I used to command roving batallions of armed men, deployed to intimidate my enemies and enforce my rule; now I finance the same trucks they used to drive around in! Like this 1999 Dodge Ram, seventy-nine-ninety-five! Just thinking about it is enough to drive a man kah-razy!

People ask me, they say "Crazy Terry, how is it you can offer these great loan packages that the white man's banks can't?" Well, I'll tell you how! If you miss a payment, we SHUT YOUR CAR DOWN FROM SPACE.

So come on down to Crazy Terry's Used Car Capital! Highway 6 near the Perimeter, one block west of Red Sun Gas Bar. Crazy Terry's Used Car Capital: the best in the business, and you can take that to the bank!

Manitoba Links Weekly: Inaugural Edition (ManLinkWeek 1)

2011-10-19T23:26:00.003-05:00

Part of Winnipeg's appeal to me -- and it's likely that I'm at least partially mythologizing this, but humour me -- part of the charm of Winnipeg is its stubborn, scrappy DIY ethic.

It makes perfect sense, given our isolation, that the city and its people developed a mentality of screw-you self-sufficiency; most other similar-sized cities can look to larger nearby urban centres for additional amenities, but when our closest outposts of civilization were six to eight hours away by car or a few days away by horse, folks here kind of figured that they'd be better off setting up what they needed themselves. Universities and trade schools, music labels, transport networks, museums, construction companies, ballet academies, whatever; when something isn't around, and there's no equivalent nearby, we're the sorts of folk who just start doing it ourselves and intend to figure it out as we go along.

These natural urges have been dulled and domesticated somewhat in recent decades by improvements in transportation, by the rise of information technology, and by our gleeful provincial suckling of transfer payments, but even mostly dormant the instinct remains. Want something? Put it together! Bam, problem solved.

Such is the case with this post, today. I'd been thinking recently that it'd be fun to have a regular collection of interesting Winnipeg- and Manitoba-related links -- like these with additional commentary and explanation, like these but locally themed. I thought "Man, someone should do that", and then shortly afterward thought "Oh wait, yeah, I could do that". And here we are!

I figure this'll be a fun experiment as a weekly feature, although I'll then have to figure out what day of the week it works best on. Tuesdays, maybe? Monday would probably be ideal if it weren't already Winnipeg Cat Reader Submissions day, because I'm self-aware enough to know I can't compete with my own cat for reader attention. (Have I already done 87 weeks of that? Wow, where does the time go.) Wednesday could work if it weren't overlapping with Winnipeg Internet Pundits, which provides all its links up-front to begin with and is better for having clever and reasonable people on the show to counterbalance my tomfoolery. Thursday and Friday are less desirable because nobody wants to commit too thoroughly to reading when the weekend is so tantalizingly close, and general blog readership across the board just plummets straight off a cliff on Saturday and Sunday. So, y'know what, let's say Tuesdays for now.

This segment isn't necessarily restricted to blog entries, to intra-Perimeter content, or to the previous week exclusively; there are a lot of awesome local things on the internet from days of yore, so really my modus operandi here is "this is interesting and I hope more people see it". I'm... I'm really not very complicated.

But enough talk! Have at you!

[the-watchmen.com: Silent Radar Redux, September 2011 (via scruffy the yak)]
The CBC Hockey Night in Canada video editors are incredible wizards, so their use of The Watchmen's "Any Day Now" to herald the Jets' return made my heart grow three sizes that day. (This is still amazing to watch, incidentally.) The Watchmen coincidentally played the Horseshoe Tavern last month, recorded the performance, and subsequently released that recording for free on their website -- and as far as I'm concerned, if you can't enjoy a free hour-and-a-half live album from The Watchmen, we can't be friends any more.

Although I have to confess from a personal standpoint that "Run and Hide" without "Cracked" immediately preceding it just feels... improper, somehow.

[State of the City: Round Three on Crime in Winnipeg, With Pins]
Watching Kelcey versus Grande unfold has been borderline cringeworthy, Stefano Grande serving as the Andy Roddick to Brian Kelcey's Roger Federer, but the fun sidestory here is Kelcey being the Enzo Matrix to Marty Gold's helpful Binomes. "We are helping! We are helping!"

[AutoMattic Transmission: Awkward Phone Call - Content Warning]
"You might want to do something about that" is about as fine a bit of understatement as anyone could offer, given the circumstances. Red River's CreComm program, if nothing else, opens students up to new situations.

[Progressive Winnipeg: Take me to your...uh...leader?]
This article was covered in tremendous detail on today's WIPs (see, this is why I shouldn't be doing these on Wednesdays), but I'll admit to being as guilty as anybody else of offering little enthusiasm for prospective up-and-coming political leaders. Potential solutions, however, elude my grasp; what can leadership hopefuls do to convince the media and the public that theirs is a brand worth following, and how does anybody break through the glass ceiling of boreless political viability? Well, I mean, if we knew that, nobody would be stuck with dudes like Bob Rae.

[West End Dumplings: Brandon's water tower, transit fares and other council bits]
The East End water tower lives! I'm a sucker for free-standing historical artifacts, grain elevators and water towers and whatnot, so I'm glad to hear that Brandon's City Council has reneged on its demolition decision. I don't know what it is about water towers, but I love 'em; I can't picture Winnipeg Beach or Virden without one, and if either of those ever fall down I intend to be distraught for a good couple of weeks.

[winnipegcity.com: Harvey Smith ~ Winnipeg MB City Councillor for Daniel Mcintyre]
"Mr. Smith looks dreamily across the fluorescent-lit drabness of the city hall cafeteria. 'I guess I like beauty more than anything else. I love hoarfrost on the trees. I like nice things. I love the feel of brick and the smell of flowers. I just don't like ugliness'. And off he trundles, his vivid green tie a splash under the white beard, rumpled cardigan flapping."
what is this, i don't even

[Winnipeg Sun: Rapper busted after bizarre plane brawl]
I say this very rarely -- very, very rarely -- but the absolute undisputed highlight of this story is its comments section. And how do you turn the usually-terrible user comments section of a news story into a cornucopia of accidental comedy? You write a crime story about a local rapper and then the rapper shows up in it to defend himself at length. If you read one news site comments thread this year -- and that's probably a good upper limit, if you value your faith in humanity -- please, please, read this one.

Thank you for reading Manitoba Links Weekly! Watch this space!

Your Vote Doesn't Matter, Party for Sale, and All the Lonely People: A Belated Manitoba General Election 2011 Postscript

2011-10-11T23:32:00.001-05:00

When the status quo wins as thoroughly and as decisively as it did in last week's provincial election, the urge to ruminate on it in a timely fashion seems rather less pressing.

Believe me, if there had been any important or immediate ramifications of the 2011 Manitoba General Election, everybody would have been chattering excitedly about them for the past week; there'd have been gripping and engaging dialogue from mainstream and alternative media sources alike, social media sites abuzz with activity with the debate on the future of our fair province doubtlessly capturing the imagination of all. As it stands instead, with an outcome like this, the most that anybody has really been able to muster up about our most recent exercise of democracy is a sarcastic "well, that was worthwhile" and then some dismissive wanking motions.

Not coincidentally, voter turnout this year barely scraped past fifty-seven percent, an almost-but-not-quite-all-time low. (This year marks the third-lowest turnout in Manitoba election history, behind, uh... 2003 and 2007.) There has been some gnashing of teeth since about participation and voter involvement, the low turnout being blamed on the sameness of the two viable parties (which is true) and modern distrust of politicians in general (which is also true) and the stifling flatline dullness of the campaign itself (which is true as well), but I have my own hypothesis on the matter: the main reason that voters in this province barely bothered to show up is that they're all too aware by now of how little their vote is worth.

There are currently fifty-seven ridings across the Province of Manitoba, and in any given election maybe three or four of them will boil down to legitimately close contests on E-day. The vast majority of the remainder are blowouts, some inevitably so, some almost comedically so; go drop an orange vote in Steinbach -- a blue vote in Wolseley, a red vote in Winkler, a green vote anywhere -- and get back to me on how much you feel your vote counts.

Perhaps you could -- could -- conceivably make a difference as a provincial candidate, as the campaign manager for a provincial candidate, or as a volunteer for the campaign manager of a provincial candidate. (And even these, given the power of incumbency in this province, are unlikely at best.) But as a voter? Ha ha, nah, you're fucked. I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, of course.

Here, lemme show you something; I cobbled this together from the electoral graphics of manitobaelection.ca and Elections Manitoba, with a bit of color editing for internal consistency.

Remember how everything was supposed to be up in the air for this election, an election pitched as one of our closest? A new Premier appointed by the reigning party to fill the resignation of the old one, an energized opposition with a more experienced and seasoned leader at the helm, a third party bolstered by an influx of federal celebrity guest appearances, a Green Party flying on exhilarating record levels of support, twelve straight months of nearly-constant campaigning on all fronts, the retirement or resignation of over a dozen seated MLAs, the introduction and rollout of a brand new system that established fixed election dates, a sweeping redistribution of candidates and voter blocs through adjustment of riding boundaries, the future of a multi-million dollar energy line hanging in the balance. Anything could happen! Everything is exciting!

Want to see what four full years' worth of political activity actually changes?

And that's why your vote doesn't matter.

Wait, no, sorry -- I should try to put a brave face on it, for the kids. Hey, kids! Your one vote could change all this! pfffffffffffff

One seat, after all of that, a one seat difference. And this is the real kicker: guess how many incumbent candidates were defeated. Guess how many! Go on, guess, guess guess guess guess--did you guess 'zero'? Zero! Zero incumbents defeated. That's really all that needs to be said, isn't it?

Besides being a quintessentially Manitoban result, this also further explains why voters grow somewhat less than enthused with the political process; insanity is popularly defined as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, and how many times can you vote against (for example) Jim Maloway in Elmwood before you decide you're wasting your time? Six times? Seven? Did you know Virden is two years away from six straight decades of Conservative representation? Your vote is important!

So, anyway, we had an election last week; Selinger successfully dropped the 'Unelected' prefix on his Premierdom, McFadyen QQed and ragequit his leadership in frustration, and the Greens are chuffed about their zero seats because this is still their best showing. But what of the Liberals? Er, Liberal.

It is a rough time to be the leader of the Liberals; it was a struggle just for the party to run candidates in all fifty-seven ridings this year, and now -- the party having failed to reach the ten-per-cent-popular-vote threshold necessary for the province to rebate half its campaign expenses -- it falls upon poor beleaguered Gerrard to call up fifty-six loyal Liberals and tell them "oh, by the way, you're out twice as much money as you thought you'd be". Not a real solid plank for rebuilding the party, you know?

You could tell from his speech on election night that he's not really feeling the leadership scene any more, and just wants to stick to his own riding; if you'd taken a shot every time he said "River Heights", you would currently be dead. It is expected that he'll relinquish the Liberal leadership sometime in the coming months, although with his as the only Liberal seat there aren't very many understudies waiting in the wings for his gig.

It's a party that anybody could probably just take over, if they wanted; there are precious few established Liberals to overtake for prominence, and shoring up a strong support base for a leadership run would be a lot harder if memberships in the party weren't free until the end of the year. wait, what

See, this is why I haven't been able to take the Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce and their "ManitobaBOLD" thing seriously; if they really genuinely wanted to enact lasting change and a comprehensive platform of ideas through the arena of provincial politics, they could literally just buy themselves a party. Even if memberships weren't currently free, I mean. The Liberals' debt is reportedly lower now than it was in 1998, then a cool $30,000 when Gerrard stepped in to save the party. And what's thirty grand to these guys? Chamber of Commerce could drop thirty grand a year on lunches.

Anybody could have the party if they wanted it, which is sad for the Liberals, and nobody wants it enough to take it, which is probably sadder for the Liberals. But with the Gerrard era seemingly nearing its conclusion in a party that officially consists entirely of Gerrard -- by all accounts a fine man, well suited for everything except the position he's in -- I'd put together a little something in the Liberals' honour just after the election.

/pitchpipe

Ah, look at Jon the lonely leader
Ah, look at Jon the lonely leader

Liberal Party
still in the woods and still dreaming of some better fate
like '88

Kevin Lamoureux
took half the party and left for a federal chair
there went your heir

Jon the lonely leader
when will your payoff come?
Jon the lonely leader
where do you rebuild from?

Scion of Trudeau
writing the words to a speech that might slow the defeat
isn't he sweet

then for more stumping
flying in Copps for the boost of a familiar name
ten people came

Jon the lonely leader
when will your payoff come?
Jon the lonely leader
where do you rebuild from?

Ah, look at Jon the lonely leader
Ah, look at Jon the lonely leader

John and Anita's
knives in your back while you're trying to run the campaign
One seat again

Tory McFadyen
leaving his post when nineteen seats is considered rough
that's not enough?

Jon the lonely leader
when will your payoff come?
Jon the lonely leader
where do you rebuild from?

/violin outro

See you next time!

A Very Special 40th Manitoba General Election Post (Is... Thataway)

2011-10-04T07:04:00.003-05:00

Long time no see! It has been a crazy past month for me, and I refuse to acknowledge that it is October, but we can talk about that later.

Remember last year when we had a civic election and I busted out a Winnipeg Cat extravaganza for it? Well, as you're surely aware, today is the Provincial Election, so my end result was pretty well inevitable:

Feast your eyes upon the Winnipeg Cat 2011 Manitoba Election Special!

It's an even larger post than last year's municipal madhouse, and I do hope you enjoy it; I had to leave a couple gags on the cutting room floor in the interest of equal time, but even so I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out.

Also, get out there and vote! It's as close an election as we ever seem to get around these parts, and even if you aren't sold on any particular party (I know I'm not) you can choose to think of it instead as the rare opportunity to vote against three parties at once. After this (and the St. Vital byelection next month) there won't be another election for a solid few years, so enjoy it while it lasts!

I'd written a column about electoral shenanigans in the most recent Uptown; it isn't required reading for your day's participatory democracy, but I would be pleased if you read it anyway. What should be pre-vote required reading is the excellent ManitobaElection.ca, your one-stop destination for all the information you could possibly need on the issues and candidates of your (yes, your!) riding. It also just so happens that one of the site's founders and administrators was interviewed last week on Winnipeg Internet Pundits, so, hey! Not a bad little burst of synergy, there.

(Election days boost my skill stats in self-promotion, maybe. I don't know.)

Happy voting! With any luck, I'll be back around again before you know it.

I Get to Be Part of the Red River College Creative Communications Blogging Roundtable 2011

2011-09-08T07:10:00.001-05:00

That's right! Today allows me the opportunity for a very special one-day-guest-appearance return to the ~~Princess Street Campus~~ Roblin Centre of Red River College; I've been invited to participate in the Kenton Larsen-moderated CreComm Blogging Roundtable, held annually to provide first-year Creative Communications students with valuable advice and wisdom as they set forth to create and maintain their own blogs throughout the year.

The roundtable discussion from 11:00 to noon in the Great-West Lecture Theatre will feature accomplished local notables Erica Glasier, Liz Hover and Alyson Shane, so all of the lucky students in attendance today will be treated to indispensable insights from three talented, professional, dedicated, successful local bloggers. And then I'll be there, too, presumably for balance, Schmucky McCatpicture over here explaining why you should think carefully before including a word like "Murder" in the title of anything you could conceivably otherwise list on a resume one day.

So it should be fun! I expect this'll be the highlight of my week, even above yesterday's star-powered episode of Winnipeg Internet Pundits and above my Uptown Magazine column that somebody will probably be mad at me for once it hits newsstands later today. I have nothing but fond memories of the ~~Princess Str~~ i gotta stop typing that Roblin Centre from my time there, so it'll be a fun trip down memory lane to poke around; heck, if I'm really well-behaved, maybe the fine staff in the Library will even let me do the Word of the Day board again for old time's sake. (But, then, maybe they won't.)

As for you, gentle reader, stay tuned; I should hope I'll have some points to add or follow up on after the fact.

Slurpees and Murder Record Club: 50 Years and 800 Pounds

2011-09-04T09:50:00.005-05:00

Well, hey, long time no see! August was kind of a bust for this site -- perhaps you had noticed -- but hey, if I was going to accidentally take a month off, it made sense that it would be that one. And it was a very nice month, indeed, but all good things must come to an end; the end of the summer has since ambushed our fair province, its sudden comparative cold chasing us all inside whenever we aren't waving sandbags around and hoping the water won't make off with all our stuff.

Yes, the transition into autumn has begun in earnest, and nothing heralds the arrival of dead leaves and early sunsets quite like the observance of Labour Day. The holiday is of course highlighted by its annual Labour Day Classic, the first of two consecutive football games between the Winnipeg Blue Bombers and their hated Saskatchewan Roughrider rivals, and we here at the Slurpees and Murder Record Club are nothing if not dedicated to the journalistic concept of equal time. So! Today's super-special super-sized Labour Day installment will feature two timeworn vinyl selections -- one representing our beloved-until-hockey-arrives Blue Bombers, and one representing the fearsome (if backwards) scourge of the Roughriders.

We begin with a piece of Blue Bomber history, or rather a half-century chunk of it:

Winnipeg Blue Bombers and CJOB/68 - 50 Blue & Golden Years (1980)

I have been quite fairly accused in the past of going overlong on description in these posts, enough so that my rambling renders the intended content redundant. So I'll limit myself here to quickly pointing out a few of my favourite bits, and you can experience the rest for yourself.

-- The narration on the album is, as best I can guess, handled by Cliff Gardner; his is one of the two signatures on the liner notes, and Morris Smith conversationally addresses his segment to Cliff, but since Gardner predates my radio listenership considerably I can really only be reasonably certain in my guess. But what I can say with certainty is that, every time he uses extra emphasis and oomph to deliver the word "boo-ster!!", he makes me think he's Space Ghost.

-- Mo Simovitch was one smooth-sounding dude, and I wish I could pronounce the words "characters" and "clowns" ("kuh-lowwwwwns") half as effectively as he does in his segment on side one. He also uses the phrase "eastern hillbilly" in describing the team's conceptualization of the Argos, which... I guess must have been a thing at the time, but indicates what a different world it was in those days. (It might be fun to revive it, though, just to mess with Torontonians. You know? See how well a guy in a suit who pays two hundred dollars to read his Blackberry at the Maple Leafs game fields a bout of cognitive dissonance.)

-- By far my favourite part of the interview with (pre-"Cactus") Jack Wells is his hilariously casual dismissal of the '41 Vancouver Grizzlies, especially since there's no way to tell whether he's understating or overstating the team's problems. I'm not going to spoil it for you, but I got a real kick out of it. Something about Jack Wells' delivery always makes him sound like he would've been a blast to hang out with, too, this prototype-Larry-King-soundin' dude rattling knowledge off the top of his head like nothing.

-- The "Humble Pie" booster song is done rather well, but the "We've Got Ploen" song is... not. Ken Ploen, the other of the two signatures on the liner notes, had a Hall of Fame career with the Blue Bombers -- including four Grey Cup victories, three All-Star selections and one of the most memorable touchdowns in CFL history (to the point that the touchdown itself was included on the record's cover) -- and is popularly considered the single most outstanding player of his decade. He also made Winnipeg his permanent home upon his retirement from football, served for many years as a popular colour commentator, received the Order of Manitoba in 2007, and is by all accounts an upstanding citizen and admirable man. But when you listen to the "Bomber boo-ster song!!" that CJOB wrote and performed to support him, and it reaches its climactic dissonant chorus of "We've got PLOEEEEEEEEEEENNNN! We've got PLOEEEEEEEEEEENNNN! We've got PLOEEE-EEEENNNN!", for that brief but lingering moment, you will hate Ken Ploen. You'll feel bad about it, but it will happen.

-- "bomber-ooski", ha ha what

-- If you're wondering, as I was, about the part on side two when they mention (as briefly as possible) that "Herron and Thorpe both got in deep trouble with the law, and the football club felt it had no choice but to release both of them", it turns out both were canned for possession charges. I get why the feel-good commemorative album would gloss over the story, but I think adding "don't take a bag of cocaine through airport customs" would be a good teachable moment for the listener at home.

-- Jack Matheson of the Winnipeg Tribune puts on a clinic of succinctness near the very end of the album, having decided he will allow himself one sentence apiece for his descriptions of all the Bomber coaches he covered. And they are not particularly kind descriptions, but I think that's part of their appeal for me.

Now, perhaps you came into this post hoping for music, and perhaps you feel disinclined to listen to all the archival radio footage and the (very impressive sounding) rally recordings and the recollections from players and media. That's fine! I pulled out everything with music in or behind it, so I've got you covered:

Musical Selections from "50 Blue & Golden Years"
(6:38, 192kbps, 9.22MB)

We've got PLOEEEEEEEEENNNNNNN

One of the little variety pieces in the above, a mid-1950s-ish radio segment introduced as being by "The Football Philosopher", leapt out at me so much that I embed it here in convenient YouTube format just to make sure that people will believe me when I tell them about it. I need to stress here, as well, that the following audio clip is untampered and unchanged, reproduced as it was originally broadcast.

Winnipeggers, apparently, solved problems back then the same way they do now:

I, uh, wow. I dare suggest that standards may be a bit different now than they were fifty-five years ago. Can you imagine the fallout if a media outlet ran a similar segment nowadays? "Don't worry, football fans -- I just so happen to have a foolproof plan for our upcoming game against the Alouettes! The plan is I WILL MURDER ANTHONY CALVILLO."

That's our Record Club entry on the Blue Bombers' side; a bit dry at the outset, perhaps, but on the whole a dignified and gracious retrospective that emphasizes and celebrates the class and distinction of the organization over its first fifty years of existence. We move now to the Saskatchewan Roughriders' portion of our showcase, and I fully expect that their vinyl represention will present an equally sophisticated fr--

oh, christ

800 lbs. of West Country Rock (1971*)

Hey, uh, so. This exists. This is a thing that I own.

The funny thing is, going in, and knowing full well that I had paid actual money for this album, I was completely expecting this record to suck. You're doing it too, right now, aren't you? The concept of the album has just finished settling into your brain, and now your brain is rejecting it as the recipe for disaster that it quite honestly should be. So you can imagine how surprised I was when I fired it up and realized that I wasn't hating it, that in fact my attempt to purchase a Roughrider-themed trainwreck had instead landed me a perfectly enjoyable little exercise in country-and-western covers. What a twist! Amazing how these things can backfire sometimes.

You may have noted the asterisk by the date above; the year of the album is as well-educated a guess as I can provide, since no concrete date information is included anywhere on the record or packaging. Fortunately, all three being active Roughrider players at the time helps to narrow it down considerably: Tim Roth joined the team in 1971, Clyde Brock retired in 1975, and Nolan Bailey's only full years with Saskatchewan were 1970 and 1971. So unless the album was recorded and released amidst one of the two games that Bailey played in '72, the overwhelming likelihood is that the album dropped in 1971. I recognize and acknowledge that you the reader probably don't actually care about the date thing, but I like showing my work anyway in case I'm wrong and it might be worth partial marks.

So we have on our hands a surprisingly acceptable country cover band, one with fine enough taste that the album contains both a Tompall Glaser cover and a Shel Silverstein cover. (Not that all of these songs would fly in today's climate; "Kaw-Liga" is the kind of song that will get you thrown out of some venues and shot in some others.) I was sorely tempted to post "Beans Taste Fine" here as the sampler song for the album, but I ultimately caved in to the disproportionate emphasis established by the enthusiatically terrible, brazenly unproofread advertising copy on the back of the record jacket. So please enjoy the signature percussive effect in the following tune, the mellifluous tones of a two-hundred-and-seventy-five-pound man banging a spark plug wrench against a crescent wrench:

800 lbs. of West Country Rock (Roth - Bailey - Brock) - Workin' Man (Merle Haggard)
(2:18, 192kbps, 3.25MB)

And there you have it. Happy Labour Day! I figure this will be a decently busy month for blog output -- it's already busier than last month -- so you can rest assured that I'll be back sooner rather than later. Until then, readers!

Slurpees and Murder Record Club: Just Go to a Pavilion for a Dream That You Can Share

2011-07-30T01:57:00.001-05:00

I wrote this Uptown column, about how awesome hidden talents are (spoiler alert: they're pretty awesome), and I mention it to start this post because I'm dedicated to shameless plugs but also because this is the time of year when you are most likely to find out that people you know around town are secretly really good at things.

That's right: it's Folklorama time! Kicking off with a free Saturday show and then running until the middle of the month, Winnipeg's annual multiculturalism festival -- or, as one of my former professors proclaimed it (and indelibly branded it in my mind), "ethnic zoo" -- will be filling community clubs, curling rinks and high school gymnasiums all across town.

Two weeks of good times! Squabbling amongst your travel group over which pavilion to drive to, buying a wacky imported soda pop because the MLCC never allows any beer more exotic than Corona into the festival, eating whatever the spiciest and/or scariest food is on the menu, and clapping along as strangers do exotic and potentially injurious dances for your entertainment. That, my friends, is an evening well spent, and I look forward to this year's extravaganzas (now with less E. Coli!) with glee.

Are you all ready to get into the Folklorama spirit? You'd better be! Because tonight's installment of the Slurpees and Murder Record Club is a sampling of years past -- way, way past -- with something for everyone and a finale that you won't want to listen to. Er--did I say "listen to"? I meant "miss". A finale you won't want to miss.

I bring you:

Llama Records - Celebration! (1988)
[behold its television commercial | the official Folklorama website does not actually acknowledge the existence of this item | it ain't on eBay or Amazon, and it certainly isn't on iTunes, but it is possible to track down a copy on cassette or on vinyl ]

Released on the one-shot Llama Records imprint (the "Folklorama Llama" being the festival's mascot) to commemorate the festival's 1988 season, "Celebrate!" is a compilation album of performers assumedly featured at the pavilions of that year.

Pretty swank packaging job for this album, right? It's a neat design concept, with equally attractive execution; the only real flaw is the imbalanced printing on the admittedly drab label of the physical record, but otherwise it's a finely crafted package inside and out.

I had a heck of a time getting the track times right when I was digitizing the album, though; eventually I figured out that the listed track times themselves were inaccurate, a conclusion I was led to by one particular tipoff:

Now, I'm no fancy-pants mathemagician or anything, but I happened to notice -- anything seem a little odd to you about that Total at the bottom there?

Like I said, though, a comparatively minor quibble. This album must be good, after all; what I didn't show you above, on the cover's external plastic, is that this very album was in fact--

--a Juno Award Nominee! Wowee zowee!

I mean, okay, it's just the Junos, and okay, even taking into account that it's just the Junos, it still didn't actually win a Juno. But it almost won! It stood for consideration as a nominee at the Juno Awards of 1989, making a strong showing in the category of... oh. Of, uh... of Best Album Graphics.

Huh. Well, no harm done; it's an honour just to be nominated, and I'm sure whatever it lost to was very wonderfully des--

--oh, wow, ick. That's actually kind of insulting, losing to that. Somebody at Llama Records really should have put more work into that label. Good lesson about diligence for all you kids out there!

Now, let's get into the music proper on this album. Ritmo Latino, representing the entirety of Latin America -- now that must have been one smushed-together pavilion, back in the day -- turns in a perfectly acceptable opening piece, albeit one with a synthesizer track that absolutely screams "THIS ALBUM IS FROM THE NINETEEN-EIGHTIES". Fair warning, I suppose. Still pretty good! Still pretty good.

The Irish Stew Band's "Fine Girl You Are" is the first of two Irish Pavilion tracks, meaning either Folklorama was insanely small back in those days or the Irish Pavilion was just that damn big. Or maybe one of the bands is Northern Irish? Man, I don't know. The Ukrainians get two tracks on the album, too, but knowing Winnipeg the chances are much higher that their pavilion was just that damn big. Anyway, this is an old Irish folk standard, not actually titled "Fine Girl You Are", but that's the line in the song they enjoy blurting out the most so they must have just figured they'd roll with it.

The French-Canadian representation on the album is Rendez-Vous' shortened cover of Robert Paquette's "Bleu et Blanc", and a very strong candidate for any given listener's choice of favourite track on the album. It lacks the funky bass punches of the original, but also drops the weird slippery overdubs on the chorus vocals, so... we'll call that a push. A shame this version is as short as it is, but it's pretty, isn't it? It's very pretty, and I enjoy it very much.

"Locusts and Wild Honey" is the name of the next band, and "Faspa" is the name of the song; I know that seems backwards, but it is what it is. The track is only a minute and change, so it blows by before you even really properly realize it's playing, and furthermore when you do listen closely to it it bears a passing -- not uncanny, but passing -- melodic similarity to "The Last Saskatchewan Pirate". So near the end of this song, almost subconsciously, your brain will add in "when you see the Jolly Roger on Regina's mighty shores", and then your brain will add a low, faint, resigned "dammit" after doingit. There are only so many possible combinations of notes, you know, it happens sometimes.

The fifth song on side one is the first of the two aforementioned Ukrainian tracks, the Todaschuk Sisters' "Chervona Ruta". Not everyone will dig this one, especially with the production quality being what it is, but I definitely dig it; the warbly guitar, slightly off-tune piano and bouncy bassline of the recording make me imagine it as the long-lost intro or ending to a time-worn VHS transfer of some random-ass old anime, maybe not the original intro song of the show, but that inevitable off-label second-run revamp from whatever producers were translating it into Spanish or Italian or German or Tagalog or whatever language it was going to be aired in. You know what I'm talking about? No? No, it's cool, you can take my word for it.

The Sisters have a page on the Folklorama site, which means they may be involved in the Ukrainian Pavilion this year; both also maintain solo careers as jazz singers, and it seems they run a Ukrainian Boutique on Selkirk Avenue as well. So that's neat! These are the kinds of things I learn when I hear and enjoy songs that could have been anime openings but weren't.

Last on side one is the... "Israeli-Jewish" Pavilion's Chai Folk Ensemble, performing "Alevai". I tell you the title "Alevai" now so you won't initially mistake the lyrics for "all a b'ye, all a b'ye, all a b'ye, all a b'ye" and envision a rural Newfoundland bar mitzvah, like I did on first listen. Perfectly serviceable Klezmer, this; very energetic, and proficiently performed.

Side two leads off with -- and of all the band names on this album, this one is by far my favourite to say aloud -- Blarney Band, the second of the two Irish acts, performing an old Irish folk song entitled "Mountain Dew". Now, I don't want to surprise or alarm you unduly, but I do feel that this bears mentioning, and as shocking as the following revelation may be I must ask that you be prepared to believe and accept it: the Irish band is performing a song about drinking. I know! Drinking! The Irish! I was just as surprised as you are, I can assure you.

(An unrelated aside: the best way to pronounce "Irish" is by adding an, additional, invisible short 'O' at the beginning. OIRISH. Try it at home, it's fun! PL'ASE WELCOME, ALL THE WAY FROM OIRELAND, BLARRRRR-NEY BAND.)

Anyway, it sounds exactly like you'd expect it to sound, as does the track following it. The Caribbean Pavilion's combined representatives, the Cari-Cana Singers and the Winnipeg Steel Orchestra, perform a choral and steel drum piece titled "Queen Anne 'O". It will sound to you like every other steel drum piece that you have ever heard in your life. Unless you happen to be some sort of a steel drum connoisseur, I mean, but really now.

And while we're on a roll with getting exactly what we expect from songs -- our next stop is the Scottish Pavilion and "Jimmy Findlater" by the Winnipeg Heather-Belle Ladies' Pipe Band. Do you like bagpipes? Well, this sounds like bagpipes. So there you are. It is almost but not quite Rowdy Roddy Piper's entrance music, and it plays for three minutes, and then obviously you set the file to repeat indefinitely because you enjoyed it s--no? Well, we'll move on, then.

What follows is probably the peppiest Eastern European choir song that I've ever heard, "Yak Za Dalnum", performed by the Hoosli Ukrainian Folk Ensemble. It clocks in at a bit under two minutes, but they're a fun couple of minutes, with the Ensemble squeezing in a few wild dynamics shifts and an array of really catchy "hey-hey-HEYYYY"s in what little time they have on the album. I don't know the song, or the language, or really anything that would help me during the song, but I can sure as hell nail those hey-hey-hey parts every time they come up. And that's fun! Sing along with those and then mumble phonetically through everything else in the song, that's a pretty good approach to participation.

Croatian Folklore Ensemble "Croatian Dawn" -- that's the full name, it isn't just "Croatian Dawn", they wrote it out very specifically like this so you'll say the whole thing -- Croatian Folklore Ensemble "Croatian Dawn", helpfully followed by "(Croatian)" in the album packaging in case you got confused, pops in at this point and plays a cheery little ditty that lasts just long enough for you to look at the song information and realize that it isn't actually as Greek as it sounds. This is probably why their name is so adamant, actually, now that I think about it.

And then! And then... and then.

Okay, look. I am well aware that a whole album is a lot to download, and when I put up a whole album at once the casual reader can be leery about spending precious time and bandwidth on something that he or she may not be interested in. However, I've seen the download stats for this post, so I am also well aware that a lot of you folks really enjoy purposefully listening to crap.

You wouldn't believe me for a second if I were describing this to you unheard, so even if you don't have the inclination to download an entire album, I've put this final track on the record up as a standalone download so that you too can delve into the waking nightmare of:

Folklorama Youth Choir - Pavilions Filled With Dreams
(192kbps, 4.29MB)

This is the recording of a full choir of one hundred and twenty young people, recruited from all corners of our shared mosaic, coming together in the spirit of multicultural harmony and being summarily rammed through a twisted funhouse mirror of Lawrence Welk-ian white-people champagne music by the gnarled and calloused hands of the project's demented promotional overlords.

The first thirteen seconds sound like the introductory title music of a major entertainment awards show; the next nine seconds sound like background production music for How the Grinch Stole Christmas. The two concepts merge horribly into a shambling bombast abomination underneath the children's preliminary warbles, the opening soundtrack of a 1970s cop show jumps in from out of nowhere at the thirty-two second mark, and then... and then.

The banjo.

As though sprung from the blackened depths of its prison within The Most Unwanted Music, the demented stagger of a banjo begins relentlessly mocking these poor children from beneath its impenetrable shield of unexplained horn-section hits and focus-group harp flourishes. Perhaps trying to reestablish its former dominance against the increasingly chaotic cacophony, the massive awards-show orchestra from the start of the song begins clawing and scraping its way back towards some semblance of prominence at the somehow-only-1:35 halfway point.

The banjo, unabated, grows louder in defiance; no force of man or god will mask it now.

Everything begins to swirl, literally swirl, in a hateful maelstrom of dissonant disorientation as we reach the minute-fifty-three mark. A gratuitous mass chord-change haphazardly emerges during an attempted return to the top of the arrangement, perhaps happening by accident, or perhaps reverting to some chord that the song was supposed to begin with in the first place.

Nothing in this description has touched upon the lyrics yet.

"When the whole wide world around you
needs the touch of a helping hand,
there's a way that you can spread your love throughout the land!!
Just go to a Pavilion,
for a dream that you can share --
it's the greatest gift for people everywhere!!"

This goes on for three minutes.

But it would be too easy -- too lenient -- a conclusion if the song were simply allowed to fade out under the strain of its own weight. A kettle drum and the menacing swoop of the string sections spiral the bloated and ballooning composition ever higher into the night sky, the seal-brown seepage of its noxious pollution sludging through the strained sinews of its grotesque casing, until the entire glorious and repulsive disaster finally explodes through the air like a septic tank rigged with dynamite and fireworks.

Filled... with...
dreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaammmmmmmmsssssss!

And that is the conclusion of "Celebration!", the promotional and souvenir album from the Folklorama festival of 1988. I hope you have enjoyed it!

It's a shame that they only pursued the idea once; in our modern age of digital delivery, Folklorama could very easily compile an album's worth of recordings from the various pavilion performers and offer the whole thing up on iTunes to bring in a tidy bit of extra revenue. Just... just as long as they don't try to write any of the material themselves, I think it would work out quite well.

Happy Folklorama season, Winnipeg!

The Newest in Runway Fashion: Winnipeg Jets Logo and Merchandise Unveiled

2011-07-23T01:51:00.002-05:00

As has been the theme thus far with the hasty relocation of the former Atlanta Thrashers, the logo of the newly transplanted team has been considerably behind schedule. Not that True North Sports and Entertainment has had much of a choice when they acquired the franchise; the original snags and snafus in the relocation negotiations put the new owners behind the clock on everything, from hiring staff to negotiating with players and from establishing the team name (which only finally happened at the Draft, seemingly reluctantly, time essentially having ran out) to designing the logo and jerseys, iconic elements of any team that are sort of important to have before the start of a season.

The jersey design isn't expected any time soon, nor does it have the urgency of the other puzzle pieces, but the logo was considered an ASAP project; the other 29 teams need a logo so they can print tickets for the season, companies like Electronic Arts and Upper Deck need a logo to produce the League's merchandise, the League needs a logo for its own promotional material, and the team needs a logo because augh did the constant use of the generic NHL shield placeholder just get old really fast.

So there were no signals from the organization that the logo would be forthcoming any time soon -- but the early afternoon saw frantic scrambling amidst the Twitterverse and other pockets of the web today when the news broke that the Winnipeg Jets logo might potentially have been leaked.

Could it be true? Had the internet once again worked its information-gathering magic and flushed out the symbol that would guide our beloved hockey team into its new era? Would this be the first public peek at the iconography sure to launch a million jerseys?

It's coming! It's here! It's--

...is that shit glitter? Aw, cripes, that's silver glitter, isn't it. This logo will be the single most important facet of our brand new hockey team's public image, and somebody shoplifted it from the Claire's in the mall. urrrghhhhhhhh

Now, the exact thought process of TNSE after this broke is (as always) a mystery; it may have been that the leak forced their hand, it may have been that an employee broke the street date in the name of street cred, it may have been that the merchandise was already coming and the news only dropped a couple hours earlier than intended.

Knowing the team's ongoing time crunches and how rushed the logo development process apparently was, my running theory is that they'd been pensively waiting to announce the new logo just as soon as the merchandise they'd ordered actually finally physically arrived. "Where are the shirts WHERE ARE THE SHIRTS oh god oh god they said Friday, they told me they'd be here on Friday and we've waited all day for the delivery guy to THEY'RE HERE, THEY'RE HERE oh thank Christ OKAY UPLOAD EVERYTHING TO THE WEBSITE, CALL THE PAPERS, GO GO GO GO GO GO"

Whatever the motivation, the True North ownership group quietly but efficiently made it known to all interested parties that the Winnipeg Jets' new logo would be released on the team's official website at 4:00 PM today. Everybody gathered around at the appointed hour, the F5 keys on several keyboards across the city dying miserable mashy little deaths, and sure enough--

--well, alright. So. Let's talk a bit about what we have here.

First off -- the silver not being glittery is, well, phew, you know? There's a bullet dodged. I was concerned for a while, there. It had been almost impossible to distinguish colours in the leaked shot, but the official concepts confirmed that the Jets' original colours of red, blue and white have all returned -- with silver and/or grey added on top of 'em, but hey, one takes what one can get.

The primary logo is quite specifically based on the Canadian Air Force roundel (the 17 Wing and 1 Canadian Air Division connections to the team and the city are well known, Winnipeg also being where the Canadian Legion was founded). Initially underwhelming, noticeably militaristic, but certainly not offensive or garish -- especially not by NHL standards, the league having seen more than its fair share of ghastly branding misadventures over the years. Ask around with your more hockey-inclined friends and they'll gladly give you a top five worst-logos list, if prompted.

It doesn't stand out immediately, for better or for worse, and that's largely because of its definite similarities to other logos; Toronto fans are currently complaining as we speak about the maple leaf in the center, substituting yellow for silver on that logo essentially yields the Hockey Night in Canada crest, and main or alternate NHL team logos with blue external circles and white centres have become something of a cliche in the past few years. (Blame the Penguins for selling so many of these things.)

And -- in a particularly odd coincidence -- this logo was unveiled on the exact same day as the premiere of Captain America: The First Avenger, and the new Jets logo is sort of a conceptual reshuffling of Captain America's shield. One is red stripes and a blue background around the white American star, the other is blue stripes and a white background around the red Canadian maple leaf. Isn't that kooky? Funny how these things happen.

So the gist of it all is that I wasn't sold on our new Jets logo immediately, but I've come around to it, for reasons I'll be elaborating on a bit later.

My feelings on that secondary mark there, the Captain's wings and maple leaf on a pair of hockey sticks, will depend entirely on how it's used. That design is amazing and perfect for tiny merchandise like a metal lapel pin, perfectly acceptable for a shoulder patch on the jersey or a side logo on the helmet, and staggeringly pedestrian if they decide to use it as the main logo on an away or alternate jersey. The main logo has a certain heft to it, where you can imagine yourself wanting to own something with that logo on it, but ain't nobody going to get excited about wearing the secondary mark here on their chest.

And the wordmarks... well, uh... well. Boy, but they're awkward on there, aren't they? Never mind that the two of them, especially the alternate wordmark, look like we broke into a shed in the Toronto Blue Jays' backyard and stole some of their unused design tweaks. The big problem with these wordmarks is that they don't match the aesthetic of the logos at all; the primary and alternate logo were clearly built around the intention of creating an instantly timeless brand, something that could have been established and could have existed in any era of the game, and then the wordmarks are these jaunty jagged slanty modern flourescent-tube designs. Switch the colours on 'em to shades of orange or red and you have yourself some neon bar signs.

So the first crop of symbols are kind of a mixed bag, but the primary logo -- the most important visual building block of the brand -- is a perfectly serviceable piece that should grow on us all pretty well.

It's also a design obviously intended to appeal across the country and to monetize the Make-It-Seven goodwill; you'll note, besides the obvious pander of the maple leaf, that they chose not to write "Winnipeg" in the blue paint or even anywhere in the logo. They want some dough off this bad boy -- can't blame 'em! -- and since the jerseys are still a ways away yet, True North may as well sell whatever they can get printed as soon as it rolls in.

No time like the present, of course, as the 4:00 launch also saw the arrival of a new advertisement on the right side of the website:

Shown at actual size, mind. So not a huge advertisement; a decent size, equally easy to notice and to not notice if one is accustomed to mentally blocking out the ad spaces on websites. A pretty low-key way to announce the opening of the official Jets store, all things considered, so I suppose the quote-unquote 'grand' opening would likely prove equally low-k--

...well. Never mind.

While we're poking around these pictures, let's have a look inside the store:

We start to get an idea of the colours that might show up on the eventual jerseys, looking around in here. No red merch to be seen, first off; I suppose it's a fair point that there are already quite a few iconic red jerseys around the league, but then, blue jerseys aren't exactly an unknown commodity in the NHL either. (Those team logos I linked above? Blue jerseys all.) It's not immediately obvious if the darker shirts are blue, black, or both, but the logo appears to wear well enough on them.

The lighter blue is an interesting choice, since it doesn't appear anywhere else in the Jets' two logos and only appears briefly in the wordmarks. The combination of red-and-dark-blue logo on powder-blue background might have been intended as a direct callback to the RCAF Flyers, which would be a cool nod to history. On the other hand, we may still just look like all the other teams that tried to grab a ride off the success of the Penguins' baby blues. So... I suppose we'll just have to wait and see what the home jersey's design ultimately look like.

And the logo on white? That one lone white shirt in the window, the combination that apparently isn't for sale? Yo, that looks nice. I hadn't particularly noticed until I saw it hit fabric, but man, that logo just looks swank on white. So to reiterate my earlier point, if they decide that the away jerseys will use the alternate logo, I am just going to be the saddest looking dude you see that day.

And while I'm making unsolicited suggestions for design decisions -- because I know how much they appreciate those! -- there is another and equally important impression that I wish to make upon the organization, if you will allow me this aside.

Dear Winnipeg Jets marketing and merchandising team,

When next developing designs for T-shirts, please start with this --

-- and subsequently write the name of the team over it in a font like this.

In return, you will receive my money. As much of my money as it takes for me to buy four of them, in case three wear out.

Thank you in advance.

Sincerely,

A guy who wants to give you money.

Now, remember earlier when I said I've come around on the design of the logo? Well, what flipped me to an unreserved Yea vote was a Twitter conversation with Grant Hamilton after the reveal, when he mentioned how amazing the logo would look on a line of military-cut jackets. And it would, wouldn't it? The new Jets logo is at its core a mashup of military iconography, so I suspect it would look pret-ty darn good indeed.

The two of us then also agreed that, really, it would look great on just about any military gear -- backpacks, berets, raincoats, trenchcoats, bomber jackets (especially bomber jackets), what have you -- and that was the exact moment I converted to a fan of the design, that exact second when I realized what a DIY-friendly bonanza we're going to have on our hands once the logo is released as iron-transferable and sewable patches.

You want to talk about the economic spinoff benefits of bringing in an NHL team? Here's one: when those patches drop, I am raiding every army surplus store in the Census Metropolitan Area. The logo taken out of context is visually striking but gives no written tipoffs as to its identity, so anybody unfamiliar with the Jets' new branding will just see this strong, snazzy, hyper-militaristic, hyper-patriotic circle design and think to themselves, "yeah, hey, that's neat. What is that? It kinda looks like Captain America's shield."

And! And. The logo lending itself well to military-style clothing, but not necessarily translating well to standard street wear, means that city teenagers who fancy themselves gangsters but still want to rep their hometown hockey team may all eventually end up dressing like Professor Griff. And that would be amazing, the kind of development that entertains me just by imagining it.

So I, for one, welcome our new logo enthusiastically.

As for the team's inaugural slogan, "Fuelled By Passion":

And that's really all there is to that.

With opening day in September rapidly approaching, there are still a lot of unanswered questions surrounding the team's branding and ambiance. What are they going to do about a mascot? Are they willing to revive and palette-swap the original and long-missing whatever-he-was, Benny, or will they brainstorm a new mascot? And if they do, how do you turn a rigidly jagged militaristic identity into a cuddly, friendly felt giant that will make your birthday or corporate event fun?

What about the arena music and sound effects? Every team in the league has its own designated goal horn, goal music, entrance music, home and away penalty musics, fight music, and anything else they may care to customize. I'm thinking specifically here of those pre-game video packages that teams show on the Jumbotrons before the players come out, because knowing the colours now, I will be absolutely outraged if our team backs those videos with any song other than this one:

And we still don't know what the jerseys will look like. I mean, I'm buying one, I know that, but it'll be nice to know what it is I'm buying eventually.

In conclusion, I dig the new logo quite a bit; the wordmarks put me off, the alternate logo only strikes me as a'ight, and if I had the slogan written on paper I would light it on fire and walk away. But the primary logo? I am looking forward to getting my mitts on the primary logo.

Perhaps you are not; perhaps the new logo is not your cup of tea. And if that be so, I say to you, don't sweat it too much. Mark Chipman and True North spent a decade working within the Vancouver Canucks' organizational chart, and if there's one lasting lesson to be learned from the Vancouver Canucks organization, it is that logos are not permanent or binding in any way. So three years from now, when the team is playing in newly-revised purple and lime jerseys and the logo is a cartoon polar bear posing in a J shape, I hope that you will join me in openly pining for the good old days of our pointy military maple-leaved Steve-Rogers-Hears-The-Who circle.

Until then, sports fans!

Slurpees and Murder Record Club: My Favourite Song That I Can't Identify

2011-07-16T06:22:00.003-05:00

I happen to be on Google+ now, if you're into that sort of thing; part of the whole Information Science rigamarole means paying attention to emerging trends in social media, in case a prospective employer considers it the kind of stuff that may be lumped into one's hypothetical job description. So I am now, if nothing else, aware of it -- but the platform is popularly seen as a response to Facebook and Facebook never really ended up being my bag, so I'll have to wait and see how well Google+ grabs me.

Twitter, as you're aware, I dig; it's built around the rapid-fire short-form delivery of information, a helpful skill not otherwise often taught, so I check it fairly frequently to see how people work within its disciplines. But Facebook? Man, my Facebook use is entirely sporadic, as anyone who's tried to contact me through Facebook has long since figured out by now. Facebook only exists in my mind as a way to remind me of folks' birthdays and to keep me updated on adorable baby photos of tiny relatives, which, I mean, I guess that's still pretty good for a website. But its continually rotating air-quotes "Privacy" settings and its gradual, Myspaceian advertising creep are bad enough before you realize that there isn't much to it or on it at this point; most of its clientele only seem to use it now for personality tests, web quizzes, Flash games and copy-paste exercises.

"A LOST COW HAS WANDERED ONTO CASUAL ACQUAINTANCE'S FARM!"
"HOW MANY OF THE AFI TOP 100 MOVIES HAVE YOU SEEN?? CLICK HERE"
"70% OF PEOPLE WHO READ THIS ARE IN THE MAJORITY, REPOST THIS IF YOU'RE IN THE MINORITY 30%"
"DON'T YOU HATE WHEN YOU WANT A SANDWICH AND THE BREAD ALL GONE, PUT THIS AS YOUR STATUS IF YOU OUT OF BREAD"

I guess people enjoy it, but man, I can't be bothered. There is one quiz-reposter-thing, however, that I wouldn't mind finally seeing, and I didn't really realize it until I thought it over and noticed that I've never seen it happen. You'd think it would be an obvious one, too; with the ubiquity of iTunes-compatible devices, fancy things that people will gleefully show off at the first opportunity, it's always mildly surprised me that no repost-meme has ever emerged asking people to post what their Top 25 Most Played tracks are. Isn't that weird? It's not like it would be difficult information to find, the device compiles and presents it for you in a handy-dandy list right there in the Playlists of whatever it is you're toting around.

Now, I'm pretty sure the reason we haven't seen it is because everybody realizes it would be embarassing, like dudes just know they're going to look at their Top 25 Most Played list and it'll have the entirety of MuchMusic Dance Mix '94 or something on it. It'd be really fun, though, wouldn't it? I reckon it would be; for all the lengths that people go to on Facebook and other social media sites to help people get to know them better, I think finding out what someone listens to most often would be the quickest way to get a really good sense of their character. I figure, if a guy posted his Most Played list and it was twenty-five Slipknot songs, you'd probably know what to expect from that guy if you ran into him in real life.

If such a meme did exist, however, my participation would have a different problem entirely, and that problem is this: I can't tell you what my most played song is. I literally can not. I can tell you about the song, and I can play the song for you -- I just can't identify the song.

There is a story behind this; being something of a low-level raconteur, I have a story behind most things. So humour me if you will as I reminisce a bit, all the way back to the far-flung olden days of May 2009.

I was dating a very lovely young woman when I was doing my Master's in Ontario, and the relationship lasted about a year before it finally imploded under long distances because we were in different provinces. I'd begun dating her after my courtship ended with a very lovely young woman here in Winnipeg, that relationship having lasted about a year before it finally imploded under long distances because we were in different provinces. I've gleamed from this pattern that my charm on the ladies is directly proportional to personal distance, very effective up close and completely useless from afar, like some kind of... love... shotgun. Shotgun of love! Wow that is a terrible metaphor, what am I doing. Let's start over.

So I was dating this very lovely young Ontario woman, at the time; she was a longtime Torontonian originally from Mississauga, and in May of 2009 she was packing up in preparation for a four-month work placement in Calgary, so I wanted to spend as much time with her as I could before she ventured off into then-unfamiliar territory. We agreed to meet up in downtown Toronto for the weekend and catch the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, which meant -- me being in London, a few hours away -- I hopped a Greyhound just as soon as my start-of-term classes were out that week. Now, I don't know if you've ever taken a Greyhound bus into Toronto through Friday afternoon traffic on their 401 Highway, but... it's kind of a bad idea. Not entirely recommended as a pastime you might enjoy. But you do these things for love, god damn it! It was worth it to be there.

(I spent most of this same academic term paring back my already-sparse grad school food budget, enjoying the culinary subtleties of no-name ramen, to save up for plane tickets so I could go visit my ladyfriend in Alberta during the Reading Week break. Well, you do these things for love, god damn it! It was worth it to be there.)

It was a weekend very well spent, running around her various Toronto haunts and then being big ol' comics nerds; at the end of our weekend it ended up somehow that her train out of downtown was way earlier than my bus back to London. So that ultimately left me about four hours to kill by myself in Toronto -- albeit when a lot of stuff was closed and with the caveat that I couldn't get too far away from the bus depot -- and eventually meant me wandering around its Chinatown after dark just to see what was open. Because, hey. Why the hell not.

Not nearly as much remains open as you'd think -- a couple grocery places, maybe a snack stop or two -- but I did happen across one very brightly lit palace of bootlegs and knockoffs, still open for business and neoned to the nines, crammed ceiling to floor with whatever handbags and hats and plush toys and digital media had just happened to fall off a truck onto a boat that had then sailed across the ocean. Ten bucks for a purse, seven bucks for a giant Hello Kitty, five bucks for a DVD of heavily pixelated Asian pornography. All in the same aisle! That kind of a place.

Not owning an iPod at the time -- remember, I was a grad student, I was happy to own tuna -- I was still that guy who had to cart a CD player around in his backpack everywhere he went if he wanted anything but silence on his Greyhound trips. I'd only brought one old-ass burnt CD with me on the Greyhound into town, for reasons I'm sure had been brilliant at the time, and I was a couple hours away from another long bus ride back to London. So I figured, you know what? I need some tunes.

The store's collection of CDs for sale was vast and wide, enticingly mysterious because I couldn't read a damn one of them, and absolutely one hundred per cent illegal right across the board. Five bucks got me anything on the music racks, so I eventually grabbed a two-CD set in a wooden case (!) with a tiny bit of English on it -- "POLYDOR DANCE STREET", across the front, with some tiny dancing shadows and a blue-green swirl on a white background -- and wended my way back to the bus depot for my eventual dead-of-night return trip.

And that, then, all of that said, is how I found the song that this post is about. It was the first track on the second of two CDs, which I put in first because it was dark on the bus and I couldn't read the package to begin with. (I only figured out it was CD2 later by comparing the track times on the back of the case.) The audio levels and quality bounced around like crazy from track to track, as is the nature of mysterious bootlegged compilations, and the music seemed to ricochet across all decades and genres of Chinese pop music -- including, as strange as this sounds, a man doing a leisurely sing-speaking (presumably-)Mandarin Kraftwerk cover. I'll post the rest of the album here sometime, you might get a kick out of it.

The epilogues to this tale are all sort of underwhelming, unfortunately. My romantic interest was still in Calgary when I eventually graduated, and by the time she went back to Ontario I'd already found sessional work back here in Winnipeg, so the relationship lasted a couple more months' worth of phone calls before that was the end of that. I came back to Winnipeg on a thirty-five-hour Greyhound ride -- what can I say, I've grown accustomed to bus travel -- and left the POLYDOR DANCE STREET compilation behind, burning it to my laptop and donating the set to Goodwill in London's wonderfully-named Sherwood Forest Mall. (The Sherwood Forest Mall is on London's Wonderland Road. London, Ontario is kind of a goofy place.) I figured, I couldn't read a lick of the packaging or song titles, and dragging random unlicensed bootlegged goods across two provinces is kind of lame, so I should give somebody else the opportunity to randomly discover the music, right? Right! But I hadn't counted on my little brother majoring in Linguistics and Asian Studies within the next couple of years, and of course he did, so now I am an idiot. Just smart enough to pay five dollars for thirty or forty digital tracks when the going rate is usually a buck a pop, but also just dumb enough to ensure that I will never know what any of the tracks actually are. C'est la vie.

But you know what? I got this song out of the whole thing, and it is a song that makes me happy. So! This was a success. I would eventually come to own an iPod, and on that iPod my most played track is the following:

POLYDOR DANCE STREET - Disc 2 Track 1 (Quick Start Edit)
(192kbps, 5.43MB)

I know nothing else about it -- not the artist, not the composer, not the title, not the year, not even what the lyrics mean. I abandoned the packaging in another province entirely, so I don't even have the cover art; the image I've embedded in the file is, instead, just Winnipeg Cat. (Folks seem to like Winnipeg Cat.) Some burning error in the bootlegging process, over in China or Hong Kong or who even knows, also meant that every track started with a fade-in -- so I'd edited the beginning of this song to start somewhere more reasonable, my explanation for the parentheses you see on the file name. Damned if I don't love it, though!

I'll admit, as you probably also will, that my initial impressions of the song were dampened somewhat by the hilariously inexpensive synthesizer the song uses for the lead instrumental melody line. And the (children's?) choir backing the later repetitions of the chorus seems entirely gratuitous for the first few listens. And the gong in the coda? You're going to laugh when you hear it the first time, because, well, that's funny. I don't think you can even get away with a gong in the coda any more. But even with these flaws and issues addressed and acknowledged, this is a song I can't get enough of; it's included in every playlist I make, which starts to undermine the point of playlists, and it makes me smile every time it comes on.

This song just sounds like adventure, to me -- capital-A Adventure with glorious trials and globe-spanning travels and courageous battles, a sweeping epic journey in four minutes, like this would have been the main theme of the soundtrack if a Chinese animation studio had made a big-budget Lord of the Rings movie adaptation in 1985. And it has a great heroic bombast to it, doesn't it? Makes everything seem more important, as though whatever you happen to be doing is in fact the fabric of destiny unfolding before you.

You'll know what I mean immediately if this song comes up in your headphones while you're walking somewhere. You don't even have to be walking anywhere in particular; in fact, if you have room around you, just stand up from your computer and walk around a bit while you're playing this. You'll stand up straighter, get a bit of march in your step, maybe have your elbows and fists swinging in time -- not consciously, but rest assured, this song'll bring it out of you. The handclaps (or synth-handclaps, or whatever a more technical term would be) grow on you immediately when you do, but the real powerhouse here is the hard-working octave bassline bounce going on throughout all the verses and choruses. As a lapsed bassist myself, I can confirm this as truth: octave basslines are way more fun to play than you would ever initially expect, and once you lock the tempo in you can just lean into those suckers all you want. Just James Jamerson the crap out of every note, it's incredibly satisfying.

And this whole package could have been undone by a noncommittal vocal performance, but no, whatever it is this woman is singing about, she is super dedicated to it. She throws herself into every phrase, and I suppose I'm just as happy that I don't know the artist or the lyrics, because I'm sure I would be disappointed to find out; it would turn out to be a Communist Party propaganda support song, or an extended jingle for a soft drink, or a song about doing the laundry, or something, and I would never quite enjoy it the same way after finding out that it isn't the majestic globetrotting adventure anthem it plays as in my head.

and then songs two through twenty-five on my most played list are all slipknot and dance mix 94
i alternate between THIS IS THE RHYTHM OF THE NIGHT and RARRRRGGHHHH, BRAGH SRAGH GRIGH GNEHHGH, ARDHHH GARRGGHHHHHH until i just give up on life and go lie down
put this as your status if you like music

Anyway! Coming up next: Winnipeg Beach Boardwalk Days pictures! I think that'll be nice.

On Slurpees and Stolen Plates

2011-07-11T23:44:00.001-05:00

July is clearly not Daily Post Month! But, heck, clearly I deserved a break from all the... all the nothing I do normally right now. (God, I hope somebody hires me.)

So! On to business. We are actually quite unlikely to be the Murder Capital this year, astonishing as that may seem; Edmonton's been having another hell of a year, and you never can count out the two-year reigning champions over in Abbotsford-Mission. But Slurpees? God damn, son, we got Slurpees covered.

Slurpee Champions of the World! Twelfth straight year running! Today being 7/11, and the day that you could go to a 7-11 and get a hilariously tiny free sample cup before they ran out around 6:00 or 7:00 AM, I figured that today was as good a day as any to tout our continuing running gag of an accomplishment.

It is of course inevitable this time of year that you get the usual naysayers, the "oh yeah well DIABETES" crowd, but honestly, if Slurpees didn't exist, I'm sure we'd figure out how to give ourselves Diabetes some other way. Wouldn't we? Knowing us, it's a wonder we haven't all turned to cocaine and Frosties by now.

Besides, we need something to credit ourselves with as a city; the only things that other cities know us for are Slurpee consumption and an NHL hockey team, and we've only had the latter back for a few weeks now. We can't even get our traffic lights to work; c'mon, let us have something. (Second and third place in the Slurpee Derby were Calgary and Detroit, if you're the type to draw parallels between Slurpee consumption and terrible places to live.)

One thing that I hadn't even known before I read it this year is that Slurpees were only introduced in Canada 42 years ago, so our fair city of Winnipeg has straight-up dominated the Canadian Slurpee-guzzling arena for... about twenty-eight and a half percent of its Canadian lifespan? Ish? Ahh, something like that. This would have been an easier breakdown if I'd done the math two years ago, when it was 40 years of Slurpee and 10 years of record respectively, but obviously I'm not that bright. So here's to twenty-eight-and-a-half-percent more!

I could have written a column about this very topic for Uptown Magazine, but I'm obviously not bright enough for that, either. I did, however, write this column on this story, and I would like to bring it to your attention because I dig how this one came out.

The column's concluding suggestion to MPI is one that I feel very strongly about, as I'm sure you will as well if you picture yourself blowing money for vanity plates and somebody then swiping said plates off your car. With the success of the Bombers plates, and with the knowledge that this was a pilot project to gauge the prospective success of similar future ventures, it is difficult to believe that our collective fancy as a province will not eventually turn to Winnipeg Jets plates -- and if Manitoba Public Insurance isn't handing out complementary tamper-proof bolts when they eventually (but inevitably) pursue such a venture, oh man, vandals and crooks are going to gobble those plates up like a game of contraband Hungry Hungry Hippos.

OMM NOMM NOMM NOMM

All right, I'm on the board for July! Tune in next time, true believers; I'm a firm believer in the connection between storytelling and music, so I'll tell you about the backstory behind the most-played track on my iPod and you'll humour me by pretending it's interesting. I'll see you then!

Loonies and Toonies Ain't What They Used to Be

2011-06-30T21:44:00.004-05:00

I'd mentioned this in passing yesterday, but let's flesh it out a little more today: a dollar store selling its dollar-store things for two dollars is just stupid as all get-out.

Now, I don't know if this is something everybody does, if it's a natural byproduct of getting older, or if this is just some particularly thorough internal stubbornness on my part, but after a while the price I am willing to pay for something crystallizes in my head and I absolutely refuse outright to pay more for that item again in my life. There are certain exceptions to this -- although these exceptions are pretty well limited to milk, bread, peanut butter, gasoline and beer -- but for most everything that isn't an absolute necessity, if it ain't on sale, and it ain't at the price point I default to, I ain't buying it.

A chocolate bar is fifty cents. That's an example, and that's my rule; if it costs more than that, screw you, it's overpriced. I don't need a chocolate bar, and I certainly don't need one enough that I would ever pay a buck twenty or a buck fifty for it. Who are these people playing a dollar and change for fifty grams of chocolate? Whoever you are, you're ruining it for the rest of us.

This line of thought was a primary factor in my diet as a cash-strapped, hardscrabble grad-student; my shopping list would be milk, bread, some vegetables, and then arbitrary selections from whatever items were in the sale cycle that week. Soup is half-off? Yo, I'll eat soup, gimme that.

When you pay attention to these things like I do -- and let's be honest, we're in Winnipeg, there are probably a lot of you doing the same things -- the little differences are noticeable, which means the bigger differences seem glaring. So when chains have spent decades establishing their brand as a dollar store -- a literal dollar store, in which things cost a maximum of a dollar -- they have to have expected that people would be less than impressed when they literally doubled the price of their stuff.

Dollarama is the notable offender here when you walk into one and see their damage control right out front, a sign at the entrance informing customers (and here I am paraphrasing) that "MANY OF OUR ITEMS ARE NOW PRICED AT $1.50 OR $2.00 WE STILL HAVE THOUSANDS OF ITEMS FOR JUST $1". Yeah, okay, but those are all the crap that was never actually worth a dollar begin with. And your name is Dollarama. You aren't like A Buck or Two, who had the forethought to pre-program their future weaseling right into their brand name. (But then Buck or Two tries to charge five bucks for a clock, or who knows what, so the hell with them too.)

It would be plausible for Dollarama defenders to write the increases off as an economy thing -- aw, that economy, you know how it is -- but the change was very clearly made to drive its stock prices, which worked in the short term but appears to be quickly losing its efficacy. That link also foreshadows that the move may have been made in the name of bankrolling future expansion:

"CIBC’s Mr. Caicco says Canada’s dollar-store industry will grow by 60 per cent before the end of the decade, to 2,700 stores, including at least one more U.S. entrant; Dollarama, he says, could have 1,100 of them (compared with 650 today)."

Can you even picture a 60% increase in dollar stores? Like our only collective problem with them is that there aren't enough of them? We're just going to have entire city blocks of them, it's going to be the worst.

These things stick with me, you know? I don't know why. You're all aware that KFC has a Canadian promotion it calls "Toonie Tuesday", which has been running for several years now. And the name implies a certain pricing scheme, doesn't it? The initial deal when it debuted was that two dollars would get you two pieces of chicken -- the pieces they couldn't get rid of otherwise, yes, but two pieces -- and a small bag of fries. The bag holds maybe eight fries, but what did you want? It was two dollars. Plus taxes.

It was unsurprisingly something of a success around parts like these, but then one day -- without anything really in the name of explanation -- the price point on the Tuesday special jumped up to $2.49 plus taxes, and then a while after that to $2.79 plus taxes. So what do they call it now? Toonie Tuesday. You walk into a KFC, you look at a sign like this, and you contemplate whether or not you are the last sane man in the universe.

Okay, where are we at for June here? 28 posts in 30 days? Ahhhhhhh--well, that's disappointing, for Daily Post Month, but I guess it'll have to do. Sorry, folks! I gave it a shot.

The Curious Case of the Third-Tier

2011-06-29T02:23:00.001-05:00

So that big Longboat Development project downtown was unveiled today. You might have already heard something about that.

200,000 square feet, a 154-room hotel, ground-level retail and restaurant space, five floors of office space, a twenty-story tower and a 450-stall parkade in a project to be built with seventy-five million dollars of private funding. So at the risk of understating the matter somewhat, I'd say, yeah, that sounds pretty good.

The design is certainly impressive-looking, and I dig its incorporation of the Mitchell-Copp facade; it gives the building a unique feature and a charming landmark quality. It does seem to instill the overall piece with something of a Las Vegas vibe, but hey, people like Las Vegas.

The caveat, of course, as cherenkov reminds us, is that the last major Stantec project downtown infamously underwent some changes between concept and execution. So it may be worth your time to temper your initial expectations accordingly.

But the one thing -- out of everything else -- the one thing that caught my imagination most out of all the coverage was this brief quote from the Paul Turenne story for the Sun, bolded for emphasis:

As a room full of big wigs was preparing to announce the [$75-million] redevelopment of nearly an entire city block of downtown Winnipeg, CentreVenture CEO Ross McGowan revealed that his organization decided to draw a line in the sand in 2009, when it discovered "a third-tier discount retailer" was about to purchase the old A&B Sound building at the corner of Portage Avenue and Donald Street.

"We were not entirely sure what we were going to do with this land, but we knew it had to be purchased," McGowan said.

Now, it gives me no small measure of reassurance and satisfaction to know that CenterVenture kept as close an eye on, and was just as cheesed off about the state of, the A&B Sound building as I was. And I know I'm not known for saying the following particularly often, but good for CenterVenture; with Dollarama down the street, THE BARGAIN! SHOP kitty-corner to the property, and Money Mart just seconds away from that, allowing yet another low-yield and low-reputation company into that immediate area might have been a killshot to development in that entire stretch of downtown. Instead, the agency's snap decision to purchase the building -- the camel's back that they plucked the straw from, their reaction of "Wait, who'll move in? THE HELL THEY WILL" -- and then a couple years' worth of patience has developed into, perhaps not the final piece, but certainly one of the biggest prospective success stories that the downtown has seen in years.

(Although CenterVenture will have to make a point of publicly showing the Avenue Building project some love, here and there; that's one group of developers that probably feels a tad overshadowed and forgotten, right now, in all of this.)

If you're anything like me, though -- aren't you incredibly curious about what company McGowan is thinking of when he refers to them as a "third-tier discount retailer"? Firstly, how awful does a store have to be to qualify as a "third-tier discount retailer" by Winnipeg standards? And, secondly, how do you think the company that wanted to purchase the building and move in back in 2009 must feel right now after reading that? There's no way they wouldn't remember having offered; can't you just imagine the regional manager of Your Dollar Store With More or whoever picking up the paper tomorrow morning, reading the feature story, spitting his coffee out all over his desk, and blurting out an indignant "HEY!"?

"Third-tier discount retailer", oh man, I can't not wonder who that must have been. He'd know not to say that about any of the companies with existing presences downtown -- because yikes would that be awkward -- so we know that Giant Tiger, Zellers, Buck or Two, THE BARGAIN! SHOP, Dollarama and the soon-to-be-defunct Hangers are all considered at least second-tier discount retailers. (Going into a dollar store and things not being a dollar always kind of irks me, but I'll save that for another post.) But we can safely figure that the retailer in question has to be a major chain with considerably large presence, because an independent single-store mom-and-pop operation couldn't possibly scrounge up the kind of coin needed to buy one of the most visible commercial locations in the entire city. Is there a major retail chain built on stores that all manage to be dingier than THE BARGAIN! SHOP? Is that possible? It would be actually sort of impressive, in a dreadful sort of way.

But who could it be? Who could it be? I'm left to only wonder, but my goodness, what an interesting conceptual exercise. A "third-tier discount retailer", like everything costs exactly two dollars and thirty-nine cents with no explanation as to why, the chocolate bars are all opened and half-eaten, the roof leaks constantly whether it's raining or not, the staff all wear puce vests with a button on the front that says "THIS IS GOOD ENOUGH", and anything you purchase spontaneously combusts inside the bag the second you walk out of the store. "Third-tier discount retailer". We can only imagine.

Alberta Watches Greyhound Backfire

2011-06-28T00:41:00.001-05:00

Same premise, different responses: Greyhound Canada approached the government of a province to tell them that the bus service being provided is bleeding money, threatening that the only way to ensure continuing service across the entire province is for the government to provide Greyhound with annual payouts of several million dollars.

The Government of Manitoba heard this in 2009 and went "Here is four million dollars for this year, another four million next year as well, and four million the year after that; we may or may not have a plan in place by 2012 to deal with this situation."

The Government of Alberta heard this in 2011 and went "Well, all right, let me think. No." and promptly deregulated Greyhound's previous monopoly on rural service, opening the door to any company that meets the safety requirements and defanging Greyhound's leverage straight out of the gate.

If you're anything like me, you enjoy it when companies get greedy and their best-laid plans then promptly backfire on them. So this was pretty cool, except that we in Manitoba look kind of like chumps because of it. (You sort of figure we're used to that by now, though.)

The two situations are, of course, not perfectly identical; Alberta is in a far better position to rapidly assemble a provincial transportation network from the materials available. But the idea that the Have province walked off without paying anything and the Have-Not province coughed up twelve million dollars to think about it, well, what do you even do with that.

The Canada Post coverage of the Alberta case adds that "Officials say most rural communities are on board with the change", which could be complete smoke on the officials' part, but we have no real reason not to take it at face value right now. So what is to stop Manitoba from examining the Albertan example, pitching the idea to the rural communities that would be affected by a de-Greyhounding of the province, and shopping the proposal around the other bus companies to gauge interest? Or what is to stop Manitoba from investivating our provincial Greyhound service, gleaming where the existing service loses its money, and launching a Crown replacement?

(I assume here that they withdrew information from Greyhound on why and where routes are having problems; I wouldn't have given out four million dollars a year without at least getting a PDF's worth of explanation back, but I guess that's why I'm not with the province.)

Not knowing the province's current internal dealings and plans for the situation, I couldn't say one way or the other what might be stopping them -- but that's not where I want this example applied, this story of a regulatory body rejecting the private sector's cynical attempts at hardball by deregulating the industry to solve the problem at hand. Instead, I want to believe that somebody might print out and mail this news story to each and every member of the Manitoba Taxicab Board -- and the next time Duffy's and Unicity band together in the name of squeezing out prospective new taxi companies in the city, that at least one member of the Manitoba Taxicab Board will steeple his or her fingers and stare flatly at them.

"You know," he or she might say. "I read this story about Alberta the other day."

Bullet Points on a Carnival Stabbing

2011-06-27T02:18:00.001-05:00

So, this happened. Two people stabbed one person at the Red River Ex, and that is everything we know about it so far because nobody involved wants to talk about it.

A few brief thoughts, if I may:

-- There were three other unrelated stabbings this weekend, including another in our seemingly endless parade of stories about people being stabbed for cases of beer, but I would bet even money that the Ex stabbing is the one that dominates the local discourse for a couple of days. Local coverage is clogged enough with serious crimes -- enough in number and frequency that they all, distressingly, begin to blend together by category -- that a story only rises above the fold if its shenanigans go completely over the top, it happens during a concurrent event like a concert or festival, or if the police helicopter had any involvement whatsoever.

-- Wait, where was the helicopter? Isn't this exactly the sort of case that they would want to tell people they solved with the three-million-dollar air support? It couldn't have been a range issue, since they've flown the thing to Portage la Prairie and back. Are they unwilling to fly the helicopter over large events or large crowds in case it tips them off that something is amiss? Aren't we supposed to feel safer knowing that we have a helicopter protecting us from above?

Boy, I can't wait to have this not explained!

-- What do you figure the worst pun would be as the headline for this story? I'm leaning towards "BLED RIVER EX". But we'll see what the front pages look like ~~tomorrow~~ today; I've been outdone before.

-- Has there ever been a news story where you read that the victim of a crime has refused to cooperate with police investigations and you thought to yourself, "boy, they sure look better for having turned that down"? The disinclination of both victim and witnesses to assist police efforts strongly suggests gang involvement, but that seems sillier and sillier the longer you think about the setting.

-- Besides the opportunity to be seen together in public, what possible appeal does the Red River Ex even offer to groups of hardened gang thugs? You have to drive all the way out there, it's five bucks for parking, you have to pay twelve bucks apiece to get in, and then what do you even do? Bumper Cars? Whack-a-Mole? That game where you have a magnet on a fishing line and pick up a frog? Do a bunch of ruffians stand around repping their gang colours while their leader rides the Gravitron? Is their gang charter built around a plan to pool their money and buy a plastic bucket of mini-donuts, knowing that it provides a better value for their money than individual bags?

-- I wondered briefly if the crowd was a more unsavory lot than usual because of a particular mainstage act that day, maybe someone with a harder edge that would bring in a rougher audience, but the WestJet Main Stage free concert last night was... Fred Penner. And while that connection would be pretty funny ("YOU! YEAH, YOU, MU'FUCKER! YOU DOWN WITH SANDWICHES?" "I... wh-what?" "SANDWICHES, MOTHERFUCKER! ARE THEY BEAUTIFUL?"), I am forced to admit that it is rather unlikely.

-- I'm not going to lie, a gang rumble in a carnival at night would be an awesome setting for a graphic novel. Wouldn't it? The carnival would have to be empty, though -- it'd have to be established as an annual thing, that every year the carnival comes to town and one night a year everyone knows to stay away from the carnival because the gangs all show up and knife-fight for supremacy. This is getting increasingly unrelated to the story at hand, but man, that'd be neat.

-- So with that said, and with all signs pointing to this as being a one-off isolated incident, will the Red River Exhibition Association feel the need to make changes for next year? I initially figured that it would be a coin toss; the lipservice about safety would be obligatory, of course, and perhaps next year would have a trial period of patdowns upon entering (that the public would inevitably complain about), but I wasn't envisioning any real lasting effects for the long term.

But then I remembered that a man was beaten to death a few years back during Islendingadagurinn in Gimli, a town not exactly known for its sky-high homicide rates. Festival organizers and the Mayor of Gimli reassured everyone that it was an isolated incident, and that the festival would not be meaningfully disrupted by cutting back the more liquor-laden, trouble-courting aspects of the event. And I don't cast any aspersions on them for that strategy, because it is well reasoned and as viable a response as any, but the problem here and now is that theirs was not the response the Red River Exhibition Association needs to pay attention to.

It was the sentencing for that attack, earlier this year, that made headlines when the two assailants received one day in jail and three years' probation for the death. And I doubt very strongly that the Association would directly identify that case as a factor, but I also doubt very strongly that the outcome isn't fresh in their minds.

The Gimli case was a serious assault at an annual outdoor public event that led to almost scandalously lenient sentencing when the Crown could find nobody willing or able to accurately identify the suspects and series of events. What the Red River Ex has on its hands right now is a serious assault at an annual outdoor public event, with the current situation being such that CJOB describes police efforts as "having trouble with a description of the suspects and what happened [because] witnesses aren't co-operating." An uncooperative victim and uncooperative witnesses in an already-high-profile case mean that -- even if the suspects are eventually identified, captured, and charged -- the hard evidence against them will amount to little enough that whatever possible sentence the Crown can squeeze out of it will only be seen as adding insult to injury.

So the Association's immediate response, what they announce within the next day or two, is not necessarily important in the long run; it will be when (or, of course, if) this story goes through the justice system that the Red River Ex will have its hand forced and the Association will need to put up a display of strength. Unless some breakthrough happens in the investigation that can solidly identify the suspects, weapon, motive, and correct series of events -- this is being written at an incredibly early stage in the game, to be fair, but initial reports are less than optimistic -- there will be no real case built against the accused and the sentencing will range from minor to nonexistent. The public perception will be that the stabbing at the Red River Ex had no real penalty behind it; that's a bad message for business, but that's a really bad message for prospective troublemakers; it leaves no deterrents to future violence until, or unless, the Ex steps in and creates some.

Ultimately, no matter what the Association says this week, expect them to be planning thoroughly for next year by beefing up private security and negotiating to strengthen the Winnipeg Police Service presence. Just as well, I think; as much as I like the graphic novel concept I wrote above, I would hate to think of it becoming speculative fiction.

Well, this was a cheerful discussion!

Slurpees and Murder Record Club: Summer Recline Mixtape

2011-06-25T23:10:00.000-05:00

my feelings for you are complex and confusing so i put a mixtape in your locker

I ended up being kind of busy yesterday, thus missing my post for the day; I'll make a point of sneaking an extra one in somewhere before the month is out, for the sake of retroactively pretending that I said "Daily Post Month" but actually meant "Average Pace of One Post Per Day Month".

But, on to business! So far we've had mixtapes for day and night highway driving, which are all well and good if you've still got about a hundred and twenty kilometers left between where you are and where you need to be. But what if you've got nowhere in particular to be, have no inclination to get out of the city, or just really like lounging around? Well, I do believe I'm about to have you covered.

Given the kind of time I have on my hands these days, I can verify that all of the tracks in the following compilation are good for a variety of leisurely pursuits -- cruising around the city, lying around idly, imbibing tasty beverages, and all varieties of general-purpose swagger. Summer heat is best approached and enjoyed with unflappability, with straight-up not giving a flap, and this is mixtape is intended to encourage said attitude just so.

Select your bitrate:

Summer Recline Mixtape (192 kbps) (105MB)
or
Summer Recline Mixtape (128 kbps) (70MB)

Tracklist:

Antibalas - Gabe's New Joint
Moses Mayes - Intrafusion
Matata - Wanna Do My Thing
Booker T. & The M.G.s - Jericho
Kool & The Gang - Funky Stuff
James Brown - Papa Don't Take No Mess
Big Sugar - Joe Louis / Judgment Day
The Clash - Justice Tonight / Kick It Over
Rhythm & Sound feat. Jah Cotton - Dem Never Know
Willi Williams - Dungeon Dub
Johnny Osbourne - We Need Love
William DeVaughn - Be Thankful for What You Got
The New Meanies - Scenic Anomaly
Gregory Kraj - Champion Reggae
Thee Headcoats - Louis Riel

That last piece there doesn't exactly match the general atmosphere of the greater whole, but I threw it in there anyway because I dig it and maybe you will too. This is, as you have probably gleamed, not an exact science.

This concludes the Slurpees and Murder Record Club June Mixtape series, booked haphazardly and on the fly as it was. Tomorrow I record another episode of Chip Damage Control and then take off to the Lake again for a few days, during which time it will inevitably rain on me because we can't have nice things. Until then, true believers!

All Right, Wye a Lake

2011-06-23T23:51:00.001-05:00

Manitoba has a Dominion City, a Crystal City and a Rapid City, and none of them are cities. I always think that's really funny. Aim for the stars, little guys!

Being the outright dork that I am for curious historical tidbits, I've always been a sucker for the stories behind place names. Thinking about it, too, the really interesting thing about names for cities and towns and lakes and rivers and regions and what have you is that -- aside from the occasional secession or revolution or coup that leads to a country renaming itself -- there really aren't many opportunities left to name any of them. Back in the day you got to name something by being the first one to get there; now with satellite technology and post-colonial globalization and everything else, there isn't really anywhere left on the planet that civilization hasn't already found and identified and titled. So if you want to name a place nowadays (most likely to name it after yourself -- yeah, I'm on to you) you either have to aim small, for street signs, or huge, for unexplored sections on other planets. And both are way more difficult than they need to be.

(Though I suppose it's just as well; you don't get to name anything nowadays without lawyers and marketers and focus groups gumming the whole process up. Look how long it's taken to name a hockey team.)

Our famous provincial exception, of course, is lakes; the path to having a Manitoba lake named after you is as straightforward as dying in battle while serving with our country's forces, or being good at hockey. I mean, take your pick. But there is a perfectly valid reason for this willingness to name lakes, and that reason is: we have way too many lakes.

And you have to realize, our standards for naming things in this province have been set hilariously low for as long as anybody has been naming anything. Manitoba has more than a dozen things named for oak -- "Guys! There! There's another oak tree! Holy shit!" -- and a couple dozen different places named for Christian saints, and even by those standards our explorers and surveyors had some serious failures of imagination.

"Found this island yesterday."
"Yeah?"
"Had deer on it."
"What'd you name it?"
"Deer Island."
"Oh. Uh... well done."

Provincial place names with similarly imaginative origins include Cloverleaf, Pebble Beach, Grand Valley, Lakeland, Clear Lake and Clearwater, Lockport, the town of Overflowing River, Burntwood, and of course the leap of creativity that led to naming a reddish river the Red River.

(I do get a kick out of this one story, though. A bunch of Hudson's Bay dudes were looking for those goofy little ptarmigan birds and noticed that they could never find them anywhere except on one particular island, so they got together and named it... "Never Fails Island".)

I think the one that most gets my goat, though, has to be whatever mental malfunction led to naming the town of Cold Lake. Cold Lake, Manitoba! Guess what it's next to. "Cold" isn't even something you can look for, though, like keeping an eye out for the Granite Lake or the Grand Beach or wherever else somebody told you to find them. And you figure whoever named it had to be pretty desperate at that point if he couldn't find a single identifying visual feature for miles around and ended up throwing himself into the lake.

Small wonder the town's growth never really took off, either, since the name would have rendered it almost unidentifiable between September and late May.

"You find Cold Lake?"
"No!"
"It's the one with the cold lake."
"THEY'RE ALL COLD."

In the interest of fairness it's worth noting that some -- some, not all, not even most -- of the names were translated from their original Cree, the Cree having named them more for functionality than anything else. And even today people who speak both English and Cree eloquently are rare, so the names would have been conveyed with the simplest and most easily understood words in either language. I didn't come into this expecting highway signs for The Winding Narrows of the Evening Luminescence or anything. Although it makes you wonder how many now-distinctive place names we missed out on because the surveyor wanted a simple English name rather than a long Cree one.

"What do you all call this river?"
"'Pinusewachiwun'."
"I, uh... huh. How do you spell that?"
"With a 'P'."

There are quite a few lakes that retained their original names, thankfully; I guess at some point we all figured, if we're ending up with names like Clear Lake and Cold Lake, we should probably try something else. So there are probably-countless lakes out there named for notables and for soldiers, one being "Downer Lake". It was named for Private Michael Downer of the Winnipeg Light Infantry, who died fighting in the Second World War; his personal catchphrase, "Now that's a downer!", was never again more apropos yet more poignant.

There's also a "Drunken Lake, Manitoba", you may be surprised to learn. The tremendous 1980 book "Place Names of Manitoba" by Penny Ham says only that "The origin of this name lies in some forgotten incident of the past" -- but whatever the story was, it couldn't possibly have ended well. You could make up any story for that and it would sound both plausible and miserable, just as you could for our similarly-mysteriously-named -- but equally wonderfully titled -- "Wrong Lake".

There's also a stretch of the Churchill River named the Pull-and-Be-Damned rapids, like naming a creek "Don't Screw Up". And one of my favourite old possibly-apocryphal Manitoba place-name stories is that a bunch of miners up north lost most of their equipment on the ice in an unexpected spring thaw, so they grabbed the map and henceforth named the area "SON OF A BITCH CREEK". Ultimately abbreviated to "Soab Creek", because polite company does not write "SON OF A BITCH" on their maps.

Oh, man, and have I told you about Flin Flon before? Ah, you probably know it already, never mind. Ask me again later, maybe.

So there are a few really good stories, here and there, but not enough to name all of the surplus lakes we have kicking around. We have been naming lakes at as fast a clip as we can since literally before we were actually a province, and the number of remaining unnamed lakes is still estimated to be somewhere in the thousands. Thousands!

How tired did they get of naming lakes? This is how tired they got of naming lakes. Our fair province of Manitoba -- this is absolutely true -- Manitoba has a series of fourteen lakes named Payuk, Neso, Nisto, Nao, Niyanum, Nikotwasik, Tapukok, Uyenanao, Kakat Mitatut, Mitatut, Paykosap, Nesosap, Nistosap and Naosap. Know what those names are? Those are the Cree numbers one through fourteen.

And more famously, or perhaps more notoriously -- by the time that provincial surveyors made it all the way up to northeastern Manitoba, way the hell up near present-day Lynn Lake, they were so incredibly sick and god damn tired of charting and naming all these bullshit little lakes that they seriously and legitimately named three of them "Ex Lake", "Wye Lake" and "Zed Lake".

In conclusion, yo, we got too many lakes; one day the Province should just let us bid on having a random lake named after ourselves, just to knock a thousand or two off the to-do list. I'm not really building towards any nomenclatural crescendo with this post, really, I just like tricking people into learning things sometimes. Local history is awesome, guys!

What We Need Now is a Pabst Blue Hotel

2011-06-22T23:38:00.002-05:00

An article in today's Winnipeg Free Press opened with a phrase I strongly disbelieved I would ever see in print:

"A Quebec-based boutique hotel chain, called Groupe Germain, is about to add lustre to Winnipeg's hipster credibility by building a boutique hotel across from the MTS Centre."

To our... to our what?

Yes, apparently there is such a thing as "Winnipeg's hipster credibility", and of all the stories to be deployed in it gets invoked for a feelgood piece about a proposed hotel development. Maybe I've missed a development or two in the subculture, but are hotels really something local hipsters clamor for? Do hipsters represent that much of a demand for unique overnight accommodation in a city they already live in? Was it supposed to be a proposed hostel development and somebody just missed a keystroke?

Winnipeg's hipster credibility? Like there are extensive groups of hipsters in Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto all sitting around and sighing deeply, thinking that their city is okay and all, but it's just no Winnipeg?

No, you know what, I'm being too negative again. I'm sure this does make sense, I'm just not qualified to parse it out in my current mental state. If I am to gleam the meaning of this statement, I must make myself capable of receiving it; I must become a creature of the night, black and terrible.

I shall become a hipster!

okay, what, what are we doing. a boutique... a what? a boutique hotel! oh, dude, yes. of course! i am willing to pay more for a hotel experience that matches my almost unrealistically high standards while still catering to my carefully cultivated, wildly overzealous emphasis on my individuality. i... i understand now. a boutique hotel.

i live in this one city, winnipeg, way out nowhere -- it's not that well-known, you probably never heard of it. it's good, though, it's like the portland of the north, nobody kn... what? seriously, in the globe and mail? aw, that sucks. man, eff the globe and mail, what do they know.

i used to hang out in american apparel before it was even a store, it all was a club and some shit. but now i don't shop or go to bars in osborne village any more because it got way too commercial. except movie village. i love movie village. and liquor mart. but eff osborne other than that, that neighbourhood doesn't need my help. i hang out in the poor areas of the city now, like the lo pub downtown.

transcona used to be so much better before they sold out to unicity. that's why i like headingly a lot more now, after they got out of their contract. and waverley west is a big thing all of a sudden? man i lived in waverley west back before they put all the buildings out there.

i refuse to live in tuxedo, it's too ethnocentric. i wanted to live in wolseley but it was too expensive, and there are way too many hipsters there. eff wolseley. west broadway is where it's at, except i don't like manitoba housing and i don't like the upper classes all trying to gentrify it and shit. it's so good, though.

i really like guy maddin. i mean, i never watched the rest of his stuff, but i saw half of my winnipeg on tv. guy maddin's amazing.

i want everyone to know that i absolutely could not care less about winnipeg getting an nhl team, but it had better be called the jets or that's dumb. the moose were way better, i mean i never went to any moose games, but i did buy a moose shirt at value village yesterday to show my support.

hey, do you smoke? you got a light?

thanks. so, yeah, i don't know. teemu selanne is a big deal now, but I saw him play in a barn way back when. you can't go there any more, it got knocked down or something. and jonathan toews was way better as a fighting sioux, he's so overrated now. oh my god.

you know something? i liked global better when it was cknd.

i hate polo park and all the sheep who shop there, but i love the apple store. so i'm conflicted, and shit.

there's never anything skinny enough at sargent blue jeans, i don't know why everybody likes that place so much.

you know what? fort garry beer was a lot better before it sold out to british columbia.

i really love venetian snares, except for all the static and shit. and i still listen to vampire weekend sometimes -- don't tell anybody, though. oh whatever, don't judge me, you still like arcade fire. man, don't even. don't even! whatever.

holy crap, the new canon rebels came out? when did that happen?

i really don't like all the negativity in the provincial election, but i don't vote, so. i do know a guy who says he's a conservative, though, it's not like i'm prejudiced or anything.

i took a year of sociology at the university of winnipeg, back before it became so big. i believe that everybody is equal, except i never give bums any money and i resent people on osborne bridge whose bikes are more expensive than mine. does that make me a bad person? i'm not a, i'm not a bad person. you don't think i'm a bad person, right? okay, good.

i liked smoke's poutinerie better when it was the glass onion.

folk fest camping sold out? already?? man, what the hell. what the hell! eff my life.

you want some of my cold sucks? here, it's good. no, it's good, have some! these are better than slurpees, everybody just like slurpees 'cause they're popular. c'mon, try. try it!

why does everybody like the weakerthans all of a sudden? i hate winnipeg got so played out, i can't believe so many people like it. what's your favorite weakerthans song? oh. mine too. did you know the guy who drew their album cover is an artist and shit? i was surprised, too.

there are a lot of stores here that sell just hats, but no stores that sell just scarves. what the hell, winnipeg.

did you see my tattoo yet? i got a tattoo of the beave. yeah, the beave! oh my god the beave was the best. they kind of did it wrong, though, the mouth is too big. see, there. i wanted to get buckley too but the guy went like ''who the fuck is buckley'' so i didn't.

i mean how do you remember beave but not buckley

who even--

wh--

Guh! Okay. I'm back. I'm back. I... whoof. How long was I out?

Thus Far the Flood Has Been Neither Fun Nor Profitable

2011-06-21T23:48:00.001-05:00

I do this thing sometimes where I write something somewhere else and then completely forget to mention it. You ever do that? Maybe I'm just getting old, I don't know. I need to start hitting the ginkgo biloba; I didn't even remember how "ginkgo biloba" is spelled, so I had to look it up, that's how old I'm getting. I can't wait until I'm legit old enough that nobody expects me to remember anything, I'll be calling it "Kinko Balboa" and calling every video game "the Nintendo", it's going to be the best.

naaah who am i kidding i'll be dead by thirty

Anyway, I wrote a thing, here's a bit of backstory behind how it came around. We're now only a few months away from the ten-year anniversary of the September 11th attacks, which is going to be just the most obnoxious media bullshit event imaginable, and I'm expecting the documentaries -- the incredibly-coincidentally-timed hey-look-at-that-what-are-the-odds documentaries -- to number somewhere in the low hundreds. But the documentary I'd really be interested in, were anybody out there doing it, would be a ten-year retrospective of the cynically ludicrous 9/11 commemorative products that companies hurried out and peddled to squeeze every cent they could from the ever-noble business of commercial profiteering off a terrorist attack.

Commemorative memorial ceramic dishes! Commemorative memorial shirts and sweaters! Commemorative memorial coin sets! Commemorative memorial license plates! Commemorative memorial teddy bears! Commemorative memorial candy toys! Commemorative memorial Ziggy posters! Commemorative memorial gold chest medallions! Precious few of these products donated so much as a dime to anything, and these products were EVERYWHERE. Even now you might innocently borrow a magazine from your local library, flip through it at your leisure on a lazy summer day, and out falls an inset card offering to sell you a commemorative memorial September 11th cribbage board or whatever the hell.

September 11th obviously got the lion's share of disaster-related merchandising, being the one that people saw on TV most often. But comparatively smaller events do still tend to generate some purchasables -- and usually with better intentions, more cents per dollar heading charity's way, since there's less profit to be made overall. You may recall that Manitoba's 1997 flood produced amazing items like this, and like the "Flood of the Century" yellow-on-white t-shirt that I swear I have actually seen worn in public as recently as last year. Like somewhere in this city there's a guy sitting on an extensive goldmine of local retro shirts, got a whole warehouse of Winnipeg Thunder and Wet 'n' Wild shirts just appreciating wildly as we speak.

So what will we do for this year's flood, already a record-setter and continuing to make lives miserable for the foreseeable future? So far, nothing, but I wrote this column for the most recent Uptown Magazine by riffing on the possibilities. And here you'd thought that I was just being a jerk! Ha ha! Granted, in the interest of full disclosure: I cracked myself up with that second suggested Brandon slogan, so actually I am kind of a jerk. Sorry, Brandon!

Everybody's still too busy right now pumping basements and being damp to get too excited about merch, but we'll see what emerges once everything settles down a bit. And when it does, and the shirts come out -- buy 'em and save 'em! You're going to be the coolest guy around in about fifteen years.

Classified Ads as Beat Poetry, or: Today's Your Lucky Day, Job Hunter

2011-06-20T23:52:00.001-05:00

[ The following is a series of direct quotations from the Winnipeg Free Press Careers and Job Opportunities section for Saturday, June 18th, 2011. Each complete sentence is an unaltered -- (sic) -- quote from a position advertisement. No advertisement has been quoted more than once. ]

[ For best results, play this music in the background and read the following aloud in your best William Shatner cadence. ]

(ahem)

Would you enjoy working Mon. - Fri. during school hours to achieve a healthy balance between your career and home life? If you are searching for a challenging, exciting career opportunity, look no further! We are looking for a self starter who is positive, polite, yet assertive, to take this Full Time position.

It's simple really, you want steady work and a great income ... we want the work done and will pay you well for doing it. Challenging work, competitive salaries, attractive benefits, professional development, career advancement opportunities and the chance to become involved in your community await you. We offer the Best Pay Plan in Manitoba. This is an immediate opening.

Results oriented, ambitious, energetic, forward thinking, creative, innovative, analytical and persevering are all phrases that describe the ideal candidate. The ideal candidate must be able to work unsupervised. The desired candidate should also possess good residential & some commercial real estate knowledge. The successful candidate must possess a high degree of confidentiality and discretion.

Candidate must have some knowledge of Standard Repair Times.

A post-secondary degree or equivalent hospitality/business experience is required, as is the ability to attend an 8-week training session in Toronto. Experience using the Internet and other resources to perform research is required. Certificate in Non-Violent Crisis Intervention is required. Comfortable with roughly 25% to 30% travel.

Work is time sensitive & high volume. Periodic overtime will be required.

You will have knowledge/experience of an AS400 system and expert estimator as well as the hydronic and HVAC industry. Experience with object-oriented principles and background in Java development. Experienced in TAM (The Agency Manager). Intermediate computer skills.

Broad knowledge of IT Service Delivery Processes and Practices including Service Level Management, Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management, Configuration Management and Security Management. Responsible for the management of Functional and Non-functional requirements to ensure that the needs of the business are translated into effective technical solutions. Able to lift 60 lbs.

A 'People First ' Attitude Is Most Important.

Must have valid class 3 driver's lic. Must have experience with vinyl, carpet, laminate, hardwood etc. Must have a class W Refrigeration ticket or higher.

Must have the ability to work with all levels and must have strong analytical, problem solving, communication and organizational skills. Minimum 3 years experience, hard & soft. Must Love Dogs.

Current in application of ICD - 10. Currently holds a level 1 license or above. Preference will be given to candidates with experience in youth engagement.

Experience with electronics and trailer assembly would be an asset. Experience in a "Lean Manufacturing" environment would be an asset. Previous furniture assembly or woodworking experience will be an asset.

Familiarity of the city is beneficial.

National Institute of Disability Management and Research (NIDMAR) designation is an asset. Working knowledge of JD Edwards software is an asset. Member of CAGP or CFRE designation and knowledge of Raiser's Edge are assets. Previous knowledge of a ticketing database, experience working in a non-profit environment, and some graphic design are all assets.

A/C experience an asset but not mandatory.

Compensation and benefits reflect the importance of this position. Sara made $19.22 per hour last week, did you? We will help you to excel in your professional and personal life. Our training program and service systems allow you to "be the best you can be".

Aboriginal persons, women, visible minorities, and individuals with disabilities are encouraged to self-declare in their covering letter. Bilingualism (French and English; written and verbal) is required. Ability to speak Ojibway a definite asset.

Please indicate "Sports Radio opportunity" in the subject line. Tracking number 1556.

Only those under consideration will be contacted.

The Flag of Manitoba is a Curious Beast

2011-06-20T06:03:00.003-05:00

Well, by the time I got back from Old Market Square and the Jazz Winnipeg free weekend, Sunday was technically over. So I'm still a post back, but it'll be caught up soon enough -- and Happy belated Father's Day, Winnipeg! It's customary to take this time to share paternal stories and memories, but I've noticed several times from past experience that all of the really good stories about my dad kind of unsettle people. (Which is too bad; they're really good stories.) So I'll take this time to write about something else, something we all see fairly frequently around here but give very little thought to or about:

The official flag of the Province of Manitoba.

It probably feels to most of us like it's been around forever -- it's certainly been around my whole lifetime -- but the Manitoban flag was only actually designed and approved in 1965, subsequently officially proclaimed and adopted in May of 1966. And I say 'designed' in the loosest sense of the word, since the entirety of its concept is the British Red Ensign with the provincial shield dumped onto it.

You're already well aware that our flag looks almost identical to the Ontario flag, if you've seen the two of them in the same place -- and the origin stories for the two of them are almost identical as well. Liberal Prime Minister Lester Pearson sparked a national debate when he proposed a new Canadian flag in June of 1964; the argument was contentious enough that it was seriously actually called the "Great Canadian Flag Debate", and you will note in that CBC clip I've linked that a room of two thousand Winnipeg Legionnaires is booing him for wanting to move away from the British flag.

Yes, iconic though it may be now, the Maple Leaf flag was bitterly unpopular among many groups at the time; three of those groups were British descendants, military families, and Progressive Conservatives, and all three combined made for some pretty sizeable chunks of Manitoba and Ontario. Both provinces also just so happened to have Progressive Conservative governments at the time, so both responded to this new national flag by immediately establishing protest provincial flags of their own -- specifically by reverting to the British Red Ensign, garnished with the very barest minimum of additions.

(My favourite protest, however, is still Diefenbaker's; when he finally died in 1979 and the Maple Leaf flag was laid upon his casket as per national procedure to honour former Prime Ministers, he made absolutely sure in his last wishes that the Red Ensign flag would then be specifically laid over the Maple Leaf flag to cover it up entirely. I can only hope to have the creativity and opportunity to do anything even half as spitefully, hilariously dickish when I'm dead.)

So where most other Canadian provinces have unique, carefully considered designs that speak to their history and sense of identity, the entirety of the messages conveyed by our Manitoban flag are "we love England" and "screw off, Pearson". And I mean, look, if you don't think that's funny, you and I got nothing to say to each other. But you would be absolutely correct in charging that our flag paints us as an unremarkable province with no discernable identity except as vindictive naysayers who fear and resent change.

The thing is, though -- we are an unremarkable province with no discernable identity except as vindictive naysayers who fear and resent change. So our flag is actually completely accurate. And the Canadian flag is famously cherished as part of Pearson's legacy for having arrived under his reign, but if you were to ask a hundred people on the streets of Winnipeg what accomplishment first pops into their head when they think of Duff Roblin, I would be legitimately amazed if even five people answered "he brought in our flag". They could be standing under the flag at the time and they still wouldn't think enough of the thing to answer with it.

No, nobody in the province particularly seems to like or enjoy the flag much -- unless you threaten to change it, and then look out. The currently-reigning provincial NDP made headlines ahead of its 2009 party convention when some members and constituents' associations floated the idea of introducting a resolution for a new flag, and the overarching party proper made sure to distance itself from the idea as quickly as possible when the public caught wind of it and soured on it immediately. So much for that trial balloon -- because we are vindictive naysayers who fear and resent change, yes, but also because the provincial NDP was still in its fanatical frenzy of putting the intrinsically awful Spirited Energy slogan on any square inch of free space it could find. These were not people you could trust with a provincial flag; these were not people you could trust with string.

No, the NDP never did make good on its ~~threat~~ whimsical notion to replace the Manitoba flag -- but they seemed rather stung by the outright rejection of the idea, and never did seem keen on keeping the existing flag around after that. Nobody seemed to notice, really, because it isn't a flag that anybody notices to begin with -- but one day I was tracking down information on something else entirely and the realization leapt out at me.

You ever look at the Province of Manitoba website? I mean, get a really good look at it? Here's a fun home game for you, if you're browsing through that site: can you find our flag anywhere? Does it even exist?

I don't think you could even discover what our flag is from our official provincial website. (Here, by contrast, is the website for Quebec.) Our provincial site has information on the protocol of raising the flag, and even has -- wait for it -- the flags of every other province, but no Manitoban flags even in the pictures of press conferences. The number of clicks necessary to reach our provincial flag currently sits at "unknown"; you are, by comparison, exposed to the still-rancid "Spirited Energy" slogan within one click.

The province also maintains a Facebook page (no flag), Twitter feed (no flag), and a YouTube account where the flag appears... technically twice, in the English and French incarnations of the Premier's recent television address.

So I guess the province does officially recognize the flag, after all: they recognize it as the little dollar-stole thingamajig in the Premier's office, the one considerably smaller than the Winnipeg Blue Bombers helmet and the Premier's pictures of himself.

(To the province's credit, you do have to give them this, they knew to disable the comments on these videos. Which is for the best.)

I don't know about you guys, but I maintain a consistent low-level surprise that none of our current provincial figures -- be they in office or running for it -- have thought to coopt the flag of Manitoba as their default personal backdrop. You know what I mean? Dudes like Jean Charest and Darrell Dexter mug in front of their flag instinctively, and candidates standing in front of flags is somewhat of a pastime down in the States, but nobody around here seems inclined to hitch themselves to our (admittedly unexciting, but nonetheless recognized) provincial symbol.

If I was running for something provincially, oh man, you could not keep me away from the flag. Have five of them loosely spiraled around flagpoles on a stage, have a big one hung along the wall for press conferences, have two medium-sized ones waving in the wind behind any outdoors photo-ops. It'd be like an Old Spice commercial. Look at the flag. Now look at me. Look again at the flag -- now back to me.

And if anybody asks what the deal is with the flags -- they wouldn't, but if they did -- just tell them it's a good flag. Wait! Tell them it's an unappreciated flag, one that deserves more credit and more exposure than it gets, just like this great province of ours. Then go on about believing very strongly in Manitoba and about carrying the past into the future and blah blah blah blah regional politics Mad Libs.

WELL LET ME TELL YOU I BELIEVE IN DOING WHAT IS RIGHT FOR THE PEOPLE OF ________ (place 1)
________ (place 1) NEEDS THE ________ (adjective 1) AND ________ (adjective 2) LEADERSHIP THAT ONLY ________ (party name 1) CAN PROVIDE

You know what the really weird thing is? Even the provincial Lieutenant-Governors have more charming flags than ours. Look at this right here:

Simple, clean, sleek, and still accomplished by just pasting the provincial shield into a standard template. Centering the design and toning down the colours makes a world of difference, doesn't it just? I'd wear that on a t-shirt, if I didn't know that the design is strictly reserved for the exclusive use of one person in the entire world. Food for thought, though!

In conclusion, I dig our flag, and I wish people would use it more often even though its design is admittedly kind of lame. I might buy one for the cottage, what the heck; may as well enjoy our flag a bit, right? It's unremarkable, unrecognized, fundamentally imbalanced, and deeply rooted in petulance -- and we wouldn't have it any other way.

Chip Damage Fight for the Future: Japan Edition Was Good Times, BUT--

2011-06-19T02:13:00.000-05:00

Well, the big charity fundraiser video game tournament opened up fifteen or sixteen hours ago and I'm just now getting home, so obviously I missed the post-per-day for yesterday. Guess I'm doing two today! These are the trials a man must endure when a man makes a promise like this at the beginning of a month.

The modest event raised a fine bushel of cash for the Red Cross, a good time was had by all, and I did reasonably well in my on-again-off-again flirtations with the seedy underbelly of competitive fighting games. (Consistent Top-8 troll tactics, what up.) We also then recorded a new episode of the Chip Damage Control podcast, which I suspect is going to be our best episode yet. Out of seven, I mean, but humour me.

Still, though, a certain something was missing -- a certain element that I had quite anticipated, and one I was sorry to see unrealized. What I am about to say is objectively ludicrous, and I am well aware of this, but this is genuinely the kind of thing that bounces around in my head: a friend and I were going to have a lucha-libre-style hair-versus-hair video game grudge match, with the loser also having to donate a bill or two to the charity of the evening, but instead of hair we were going to put our facial hair on the line. The manliest of matches! Bigote contra Bigote! yo why you laughing i'm serious

The other dude's moustache -- shaved down from a beard only because his amateur boxing demanded it (look, I don't know) -- makes him look like Freddy Mercury, so I shaved my considerable combination-playoff-and-lake beard down to a surprisingly feasible Lemmy for the match (rock showdown!) and we mutually expressed interest in the concept until he actually showed up to the event, pulled three chairs together into a makeshift bed, and napped for several hours. He... he was tired? I guess?

So nothing came of the idea, which is fine; nothing really worth pretending to be perturbed about. As implausible as this next claim might be, I have had dumber ideas in my life. Except that now I'm a dude who happens to have a Lemmy moustache on his face for no particularly good remaining reason, and as such my credit rating is probably dropping like a stone right now even as I type this. I'm at the point mentally now, though, where shaving the whole thing off without a payoff to the angle would be admitting defeat, because -- being still unemployed (aargh) with nowhere in particular to be -- my reasons to shave at this point are limited to "I have another job interview" or "I have an idea for a novelty charity match at a video game tournament". And neither of those apply! A torn man and a tortured soul, truly that describes me best at the moment.

There isn't really a whole lot else to say about this development, except that it serves as a helpful character note for how I operate; one day I will be dead, and at my funeral they will look into my casket -- or into the cannon before it fires my ashes into Lake Winnipeg, or whatever -- and this will be the sort of thing they reminisce about. "He was crazy," they'll conclude, I figure.

Anyway! T'was a good event with a good turnout and a good bankroll for a good cause, and later today I'll come back with another post that has nothing to do with video games or facial hair. A sound plan, yes?

Slurpees and Murder Record Club: Nighttime Highway Mixtape

2011-06-17T18:21:00.000-05:00

i like you but i am shy so i made you a mixtape are you going to the dance this weekend y/n

As promised last week, this is the counterpart to the previous podcast mixtape whatchamacallit; where last week's compilation was for the daylight drive out of the city to start the weekend, this week's compliation is for the (usually reluctant) night drive back in.

You'll recall that last week I gave the file about twenty minutes of pre-highway warmup to let you get out of the city, but that's obviously not the case when you're driving back from far-flung lakes or woods or wherever you end up. So this mix gives you about ninety seconds to get driving, pretty well all you need to get yourself onto the road, and if you aren't on your way by then it's not my fault that you backed into the ditch again. SMOOTH MOVE EX-LAX HAW HAWWWWWWall right i'll go get the truck

I've been back and forth between city and lake more times than I can count already this year -- stupid leaking roof grumble grumble why I oughtta -- so I can assure you that everything in this mixtape is thoroughly road-tested and road-approved. This being a night playlist rather than a day playlist, most ideal with the stars out but also good for clouds, I threw in some darker and weirder stuff and more electronic joints than last time but also made sure to pepper it liberally with music that'll keep you awake. I think you'll agree that's a pretty good strategy!

Pick your preference:

Nighttime Highway Mixtape (192 kbps) (105MB)
or
Nighttime Highway Mixtape (128 kbps) (70MB)

Tracklist:

Boards of Canada - Kaini Industries
Florence + The Machine - Howl
Broder Daniel - Dark Heart
The Protomen - Light Up The Night
Holy Fuck - The Pulse
Ladyhawke - My Delirium
Pride Tiger - Forget Everything
The Futureheads - Let's Dance
Masafumi Takada - 100STARS DX
Aphex Twin - Digeridoo (Aboriginal Mix)
Peter Gabriel - Darkness (Engelspost Remix)
Beck - Still Missing (Röyksopp Reix)
Hercules & Love Affair feat. Antony Hegarty - Blind (Frankie Knuckles Remix)
Dondolo - Dragon (Shit Robot Remix)

But, wait! I've done one mixtape for driving in and one for driving out, but there's still another Friday left in June; now what the hell am I going to do? Tune in next Friday for the third and final mixtape; I'm sure I'll think of something.

Never Mind Vancouver Burning, Tonight is Spacing Magazine Party Time

2011-06-16T18:34:00.000-05:00

So apparently Vancouver took the Stanley Cup loss pretty well, I don't know if you heard anything about it.

We'll be sure to talk about that big hullabaloo from last night at a later date; the story certainly isn't going to fade away within the next few days, and you can guarantee that Vancouver will definitely be hearing about it for years and years to come. But time is of the essence for this next item, and if you aren't doing anything tonight may I offer this event to you for your consideration.

We were lucky enough to have Matthew Blackett of Spacing Magazine sit in on yesterday's episode of Winnipeg Internet Pundits, and the reason that he is in town is for the very first stop on the Spacing Road Show going across the country.

The event is tonight at the RAW Gallery, 290 McDermot Avenue in the Exchange; five dollars gets you admission and the most recent edition of the Jane-Jacobs-Award-winning Spacing Magazine. (I've seen it, it's very nice.) Doors open at 7:30 PM, and the show proper appears to kick off at 8:30 with an urbanism panel combining the Spacing Magazine team with the University of Manitoba's Richard Milgrom, the University of Winnipeg's Christopher Leo, and beloved local blogger -- coincidentally a Uptown Best Local Blog finalist and one of The Uniter 30 -- Robert Galston.

The panel is scheduled for an hour, after which the event will transmogrify into to a more casual social meetup. This means a sparkling opportunity to meet some of the city's brightest and most talented local urbanism enthusiasts, all gathered in one place for stimulating conversation -- and then I'll be there too! In case you like, I don't know, fart jokes.

Tomorrow's post will be a sequel to the post from last Friday, so -- see you here tomorrow, true believers!

Vancouver Canucks, You are Now the Enemy (or: The 2011 Stanley Cup Finals Ended Tonight)

2011-06-15T23:53:00.001-05:00

Congratulations to the Boston Bruins on winning the 2011 Stanley Cup.

Putting aside the usual claptrap about supporting CANADA'S TEAM, where "Canada's Team" equals whoever goes farthest, I can't even pretend to hate on the Boston Bruins -- because they were the second-scummiest team in this series, yes, but more particularly because this Boston group was the hockey incarnation of the Island of Misfit Toys. Tomas Kaberle and Tyler Seguin are the twin daggers in the heart of Maple Leafs fans (which means they're okay in my books), Zdeno Chara was the guy Ottawa threw away because Wade Redden was just such an important player to keep, Claude Julien has been unceremoniously thrown out of several classier joints than this, and 37-year-old Tim Thomas (did you see his victorious CBC interview where he got flustered, had to stop, and then said "I'm sorry -- I've never done this before?" SO ADORABLE) has been at this so long, and underappreciated so long, that he was drafted 217th in 1994 by the Quebec Nordiques. Now he's the Stanley Cup and Conn Smythe winning goalie who had the best regular season save percentage and best playoff shot total in hockey history, and multiple camera angles in Game 7 confirmed that his wife is hot and his daughter is just the cutest thing. I don't know how you not like Tim Thomas. Is that possible? Is that a thing people do? I should certainly hope not.

As for the Vancouver Canucks, the fourth Canadian team in seven seasons to reach the Final and the third in seven years to push it to seven games, let me just say this on behalf of Winnipeg sports fans:

You are dead to us. Next year, it is on.

We here in the Manitoba capital were willing to pretend that we were your friends so long as we had that tenuous AHL connection to you, swallowing our pride and serving as your subservient underlings for as long as it took to shake off your reigns and regain our rightful place in the spotlight, but now that we've clawed our way back to equal footing -- having the same number of Stanley Cups as you do, after all -- you know full well that every bit of vitriol we've carefully saved up since 1996 will be fired at you at once, and furthermore that every bit of it will end up in the back of the net because you started Luongo instead of Schneider. Yes, once we and our speculative Photoshop galleries get ahold of you, we fully intend to give your tiny floppy team something to dive about.

This was your one last chance to cash in on all of our accrued Moose goodwill, all the support and love we poured out for locally developed heroes like Schneider and Burrows and Hansen and Oreskovich (yo, can we trade for Oreskovich?), and you blew it like Aaron Rome blows every defensive assignment you give him. So no more! You are the enemy now, our bitterly hated rivals, and next year when we play you once because we're technically in the Southeast Division until 2012 we will beat you and you will deserve it.

Fear and beware the wrath of Unnamed Winnipeg NHL Team 2011!

You Get a News Story Like This and the Jokes Write Themselves

2011-06-14T21:28:00.004-05:00

News reports emerged today that the City of Winnipeg will be awarding reality television star and occasional KISS bassist Gene Simmons with its highest honour, the Key to the City. Questions linger about the exact explanation for the honour, but City insiders say it's just to see how hard the Globe and Mail will have to work to write a positive article about it.

Big news out of the Manitoba capital today, as KISS personality Gene Simmons will receive Winnipeg's Key to the City! Asked about the public reaction to associating with such a well-publicized reputation for depravity, classlessness and mediocrity... Gene Simmons said he knew, but he would have felt bad about turning it down.

Simmons is being given the key in recognition of his "remaining true to his roots and values". Simmons, 61, has famously claimed to have slept with 5,000 women; this is expected to complicate police questioning of jealous boyfriends when he inevitably gets stabbed downtown tomorrow.

Reports today indicate that KISS singer and bassist Gene Simmons will be receiving the City of Winnipeg's highest honour, the Key to the City. Not to be outdone, Air Supply vocalist Russell Hitchcock will receive a lifetime key to the McPhillips Station Casino.

Stung by recent criticism about a hypothetical 2014 mayoral bid, outgoing Winnipeg City Councillor Gord Steeves will be presenting C-list celebrity Gene Simmons with a Key to the City tomorrow -- thus showing that he has, in fact, learned everything he would need to follow the current Mayor.

Winnipeg Mayor Sam Katz will unfortunately have to miss the event as he will be in Israel at the time, having taken the wrong gate while flying back from Phoenix again. Reached for comment by phone, Katz, 59, confirmed that -- aside from the birth of his current wife -- KISS albums were his favourite part of the late 1970s.

And, finally: Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada will 'Shout It Out Loud' in a special ceremony at noon tomorrow, as KISS frontman Gene Simmons will be honoured with the Key to the City. Analysts say that the combination of Simmons and Winnipeg is a perfect fit, as both peaked decades ago and have been embarrassingly declining ever since.

And that's the news!

No, You Can't Read That, You Might Enjoy It

2011-06-13T23:37:00.004-05:00

This column popped up in the Free Press over the weekend, and promptly went ignored on the website because it offers no opportunities to blame visible minorities or levels of government for the problems discussed.

Professor Linda Trimble of the University of Alberta's Political Science Department argues for a broader acceptance of the combination of information and entertainment in political reporting, primarily opposing Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death" and its stance that modern forms of media are incapable of sustaining the level of discourse necessary to properly inform an audience. In short, where Postman believed that the common man's understanding of issues and information is lessened by the modern mainstream's slant towards entertainment, Trimble argues that the common man's best chance of understanding issues and information is through the modern mainstream's slant towards entertainment.

She writes:

"Communications experts have coined a bunch of terms to describe this phenomenon, including 'infotainment,' 'newzak,' 'tabloidization' and 'politainment.' Critics say information is obscured when news is fun. 'Infotainment' allegedly promotes style over substance.
(. . .)
"I want to challenge the myth that so-called 'real' news is democracy's oxygen while 'infotainment' has the deadly effect of carbon monoxide."

I'm curious about what may be a generational gap in these portmanteaus; in my experience the dominant term has always been "edutainment", which was huge from the mid-1980s onward as people realized there was a gigantic market for educational computer games like Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? and Oregon Trail. (Shoutouts to Crosscountry Canada!) The genre's main studios were eventually bought up by multinational conglomerates and mismanaged into ruin, which was really too bad, but the term endured. Neither here nor there, just a brief aside.

More germane a concern is that I'm not entirely sure what brought the column on; Postman is the only example she cites for the opposing viewpoints of "critics" and "communication experts", and the book she quotes was released in 1985. I mean, if tomorrow I just went frigging bonkers railing on Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History?", you would be well within your right to wonder what my deal was. Maybe I stubbed my toe on it when I got up that morning! You never know.

Perhaps I'd missed it, so feel free to fill me in: has there been a furtive but widespread rise in recent months of academics and experts bemoaning our national turn to the dreaded ~~edutainm~~ infotainment? Presumably such a wave would have originated as backlash against Sun TV ,but Sun TV's problem has been less its commitment to ~~edutai~~ ~~dammit~~ infotainment and more that its production values make everything look like a high school play touring a public access channel.

So I don't know why she wrote it, and I don't know what contemporaries she's debating against, and I don't know why she chose the vernacular she did -- but that's not to say that her central point is necessarily invalid. The matter may somewhat conflate the concepts of "entertaining" and "interesting", but it seems fair enough to agree that people are not going to read or watch something that does not capture or hold their interest.

Remember that I have degrees in Political Studies, History, and Library and Information Science, so you can trust me when I tell you that this is not a problem restricted to political reporting. I mentioned yesterday the (Canadian-literary-equivalent-of-)famous accusation that historian J.L. Granatstein leveled at Pierre Berton in the late 1970s: Granatstein indicted Berton for the sin of having "consciously made his work interesting", with Berton's equally famed response to the charge being "Well, Professor, I sure as hell don't consciously make it dull."

(Decades later, in 2004, Granatstein would go on to win the Pierre Berton Award -- an award given for "distinguished achievement in presenting Canadian history in an informative and engaging manner". I'm sure he appreciated it, but that still must have stung a little; imagine Nas winning an award named after Jay-Z.)

I believe I can vouch for the difference -- speaking as somebody who went a couple rounds through the Ivory Tower, and as somebody who's been alternating frequently as late between blog posts and cover letters -- I can vouch for the immeasurable, insurmountable difference that exists between writing intended to be read and writing intended to be approved. Granatstein happens to have a chapter about this very difference in his 1998 book "Who Killed Canadian History?", which I'd highly recommend reading if you haven't previously. (The Winnipeg Public Library system has three copies, all of them checked in. Summer reading! Get at me.) His viewpoint, coincidentally also my viewpoint, is that the biggest problem with history as a discipline -- and the reason that history goes almost completely unread nowadays -- is that the vast majority of modern historiography is written in the sole pursuit of promotion and tenure, for academics by academics and accepted or rejected by other academics.

This was one of the factors in my jumping of ships from historian to librarian: I find it intrinsically more rewarding to simplify complicated research for a broader audience than I do to further complicate it in the name of impressing a select few. (Another of the factors, as you probably already guessed, was the Sisyphean frustration of living in Manitoba and trying to get a job with an undergraduate degree in History and Political Studies. But let's not talk about that right now.) Pierre Berton is a gold standard of nonfiction, in any genre or medium; he was able to make people interested in, and entertained by, subjects that they would otherwise have found dull and ignored forever.

Berton stands out particularly because he dedicated decades of his life to a field -- Canadian history written for mass audiences -- that almost nobody even attempts any more, a field that might actually be rendered completely extinct once Peter Newman dies. It's a genre that desperately needs to be shored up, and the easiest way to shore it up is to write interestingly about current affairs and then wait. Politics plus time equals history. It isn't a complicated equation.

(Nerd alert: one of my favourite things to do in used bookstores is to rifle through the old annual compilations of editorial cartoons. It's surprisingly educational fun! Don't judge me!)

So I'm all for the integration of entertainment value into journalism and political writing (and I'd do it myself if I thought anyone would pay me for it), so long as the people attempting it at least make the attempt to apply it evenly. That's the exception that people take to ~~edutainmen~~ ~~fffffff~~ infotainment in political coverage -- not that it attempts to be entertaining, but that the attempt is only ever made in the name of transparently swinging an audience to its point of view. People complain about our modern mainstream media when they feel that the coverage is too biased; people never complain because they feel that the coverage is too purposefully engaging.

And the one observation I keep coming back to is that we've finally hit the point where political journalism, written history, and indie music all have the same problem: nothing you do is any good if too many people enjoy it.

"Macho Man" Randy Savage in a Waffle House is Better Than Anything I've Ever Written

2011-06-12T23:55:00.001-05:00

I've got this long complicated post brewing in my head about the roles of storytelling and narrative in explaining and conveying past history or present news, and about the perceived sin in both fields of -- as Jack Granatstein once famously accused Pierre Berton ("famously" at least in terms of Canadian literary history, which is to say "completely not famously") -- consciously being too interesting. But if it'll be long and complicated by my standards you know it's probably going to be a doozy, so that obviously won't be our post for tonight.

So to fill that time, in the interim, I want to direct you to something amazing for your trouble. Something so great that I actively think less of myself for not seeing it when it originally came out, instead having only come across it a few days ago.

Following the death of legendary professional wrestler and major crossover superstar "Macho Man" Randy Savage on May 20th -- which, and I will phrase this in the interests of classical objectivity, may or may not have prevented the Rapture that was popularly expected the next day -- the entire internet seemed to come forward at once with stories and expressions of everything they'd loved about Savage's long and diverse career. But the absolute best reminiscence, and one that flew under the radar in the clamor, was this blog post by his coworker and friend 'Dirty' Dutch Mantel. The first part of the post is eaten up with a plug for his book, so scroll down until you reach the Randy Savage tribute and then get ready for what has to be -- I refuse to believe that this could be anything but -- the single greatest Randy Savage story ever told.

Truth, as they say, is stranger than fiction, and life, as they say, imitates art. They warn you nowadays on the various wrestling (well, "sports entertainment", but let's not get into that) programs that you should absolutely not try anything you see therein at home, and people assume those warnings are in there so children won't kill each other with tombstone piledrivers. But it is very good advice, and you will realize why while reading that story: two Nashville police officers in the late 1970s attempted the classic wrestling staple of "one guy holds a wrestler while the other guy tries to hit the wrestler with a foreign object" -- as if completely unaware of what the inevitable result has to be -- and the inevitable result happened when Randy Savage slipped the cop's grasp at the last possible moment and the other cop blasted his partner square in the face with a can's worth of mace. This actually happened. In real life.

I could turn this computer off right now and just walk away from it forever, because nothing I write in my lifetime will ever be as perfect as knowing that, for one brief shining second, the real world operated entirely on professional wrestling laws and principles. It would be like reading that a man tried to kill a real-life roadrunner with dynamite, the dynamite failed to detonate when the roadrunner stood by it, and then when the man went over to investigate the dynamite it exploded in his grasp. It would be like reading that real-life extraterrestrials touched down near an isolated farmhouse, attempted to start a conversation with a telephone they found, went "yip yip yip yip yip yip" to each other, danced for the crowd, and then beamed back up again. You know what I mean? Sometimes the worldview you cultivated through an entire wasted childhood just gets massively vindicated, and that Randy Savage recollection above is absolutely one of those times.

I would attempt to tie this back into my earlier mention of storytelling and narrative, but nah, let's not overthink this. It's just a really, really, really entertaining read. And as for my originally intended post, ahhh, I'll try again tomorrow.

Unpredictable Discolouration is Not a "Tip"

2011-06-11T23:50:00.002-05:00

Yeah, so, our cottage roof started leaking earlier this week. The province has seen record rains as late, subsequently leading to (another round of) record flooding, so I suppose it was inevitable that some sort of rain-related mishap would eventually befall my lakeside hideaway destination.

There only are the four English channels up here, so I was settling in just after midnight on Tuesday to watch the Daily Show on CTV -- because, honestly, what else am I going to get that time of night on four channels -- when my very peaceful atmosphere was interrupted by a very loud DROOSH and then a whole bunch of water hitting the floor, subsequently slowing to a trickle and then to the kind of obnoxious dripping that doesn't make it particularly easy to fall asleep that night.

Inevitably -- and I have come to expect this from previous experience -- it was going to fall to me to try and fix this, me being the only person both agile and stupid enough to go up the fifty-five-degree-angle roof here. So today, in anticipation of tomorrow's vicious thunderstorm (an aside, if I may: STOP RAINING ON ME WEATHER GOD DAMN IT STOP IT STOP IT ARGH), I went up to the tiny rectangular enclave at the highest point of the hideout and did my best to waterproof anything that looks like water might be coming through it.

(Here I'd been all prepared to find and replace any compromised shingles, and the suspicious areas all ended up being in the roll roofing! There's nothing quite as satisfying as hauling a bag of several weighty tools you won't need up a steep roof! Ha ha! I'm an idiot!)

So my big excitement tomorrow will be waiting for it to rain (which will be a 'when' and not an 'if', because it is summer in Manitoba) and then finding out whether or not the ceiling attempts to drown me. If it doesn't, great! I am a handyman. And if it does, well, at least I have a much better idea of where the problem is.

With all of that said, then, let me tell you about the packaging of Black Knight Clear Waterproof Roof Patch. I get a kick out of the term "roof patch", just because it doesn't leave a whole lot of room for misinterpretation. ("What's that?" "Roof patch." "What does it do?" "It... seriously?") So if you've seen or used it before you have a pretty good idea of how it works, but because I'm the type to read everything anyway I must note that I took a bit of exception to their list of -- as the header proclaims them -- "WISE TIPS".

Three of these are perfectly acceptable tips of wisdom in that they are things that you can actually do, actions you can control that will actively increase your likelihood of success with the product. But then that third one is really just a warning they didn't bother to move two inches upward into the Caution section, just an "oh by the way sometimes this product screws with everything". That's not really advice, per se; that would more accurately be described as a 'warning'. And also as an admission that the product doesn't quite work as advertised, since the front of the packaging promises to "Maintain original beauty of your roof" and not to "Randomly turn shit grey".

But let's also get a load of the rest of that warranty there, the one just below the tip box:

Is it just me, or is that "applicator's skill" clause a solid guarantee that they'll never actually have to honour a warranty claim in their lives? I get the part at the end about using it within one year, because it's unreasonable to expect a goopy glop of multiple undisclosed chemicals to retain its full efficacy indefinitely, but applicator's skill? How would they even measure that? "Well, we would replace the canister or refund you the purchase price of the product, but you look like the kind of guy who was probably doing it wrong. I bet you breathe through your mouth and drop stuff a lot."

Anyway, it's going to rain tomorrow (I would add a qualifier like "likely" or "potentially", but no, it's going to rain tomorrow), and it's obvious there's no going back with this product, so I guess I just hope for the best. Here's hoping!

Slurpees and Murder Record Club: Daytime Highway Mixtape

2011-06-10T18:57:00.002-05:00

i like you but i am shy so i made you a mixtape :x

I had intended for a fine mixtape... podcast... thing? Ahem. I had intended for a big ol' audio file to be ready for download just as people would be heading out to their out-of-town weekend hideaways of choice today, but then it turns out that my old and slow computer ain't the audio-rendering speedster I remember it being. (It doesn't help that there's a couple dozen files floating around in it.) I am staring at it, and it is still attempting to render, and I am starting to believe that I could have done this faster with actual cassette tape and scissors.

So I'll cut you all a deal: I have important matters to attend to outside, weekendy matters, so I will be back later tonight and -- better late than never! -- drop you this neat file and the details on it. All good? All right! I will meet you folks here in a few hours or so.

Okay, we're back! Ah, the magic of text.

And here is a mixtape! Winnipeggers -- wild-eyed, stir-crazy maniacs as we tend to be after a full winter in the city -- are known to have a lot of creative hiding spots around the province, many of them helpfully within about an hour's drive from the city. And depending on your combination of starting point and preferred route out of town, of course assuming that no traffic or construction outliers jump out and bite you, you can usually be clearing the Perimeter within about fifteen or twenty minutes. So these are the assumptions that went into the playlist; the first twenty minutes or so give you time to get out of the city, and then the highway music kicks in to helpfully accompany your travels.

This mixtape -- I know I'm completely showing my age by continuing to call it that, but humour me my romanticized old-timey affection for the concept -- is ideally for driving out of the city and along the highways while the sun is still up, but is perhaps more ideally for staring out the window at the clouds and sky to daydream while somebody else is doing said driving. And if that second part describes you, please don't tell me; I never get to do that any more, so I would just end up being be all jealous about it.

So submitted for your consideration at this time is a seventy-seven-minute mixtape, which conveniently means it fits onto a CD-R if you're still into that sort of thing. (I know, I know, showing my age again. That was a thing once too, all right?) You have a couple options for download size and sound quality preferences, because hey, why not:

Daytime Highway Mixtape (192 kbps) (105MB)
or
Daytime Highway Mixtape (128 kbps) (70MB)

Tracklist:

Naoto Tanaka - Theme of Black Baron
Hawa - D.A.N.C.E. (7")
Al Green - I Want to Hold Your Hand
Mulatu Astatke - Emnete
Femi Kuti - Eh Oh
Lissie - Record Collector
Clearlake - Good Clean Fun
The Sounds - Song With a Mission
Bad Religion - Man With a Mission
Matt Mays + El Torpedo - Cocaine Cowgirl
Teddybears feat. Neneh Cherry - Yours to Keep
Projet Orange - Megaphobe
Lucero - I Can Get Us Out of Here Tonight
Bob Mould - The Silence Between Us
Lykke Li - Breaking It Up (Alternative Mix)
Uminski - Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger
Soundgarden - Superunknown
The Epoxies - Robot Man
The Seatbelts - What Planet is This?
Moist - Orphelia
Magnet - The Gospel Song
Neko Case - Red Tide

Plus a wee bit of cassette noise at the beginning and end, because I am a total dork. Anyway, enjoy! Next Friday I'll bust out a similar podcast for the drive the other way, back into the city from wherever you're hiding -- although that one will hopefully arrive a little earlier and a little more smoothly than this one went.

Ha ha ha, mixtapes. Wow, I'm old.

City in Disguise, or: The Matrix of Leadership is Curiously Flamingo-Shaped

2011-06-09T23:44:00.001-05:00

I had this particular random thought stick in my head as I drove home from yesterday's Winnipeg Internet Pundits show, and while I could -- and, potentially, should -- have just dumped it on Twitter as text and left it at that, I figured instead that I would sink my teeth into it here and shake away at it until I made sure it was good and dead.

Yesterday's show, you see, included a segment on the ongoing story of the Wal-Mart in Transcona -- "This road goes here!" "Nawwwww it goes there!" "Oh, yeah?" "Yeah!" "THAT DOES IT WE'RE DELAYING THIS ANOTHER TWO MONTHS" -- and in particular the curious but quaint detail that Russ Wyatt, colloquially referred to as the unofficial "Mayor of Transcona", made a point of counting all the trees on the Wal-Mart site. There are six, and two are dead. That is what Russ Wyatt wanted you to know.

Understand that if Transcona were its own town -- as it was, of course, until 1972 -- Russ Wyatt would be the Mayor of Transcona. His authority is basically absolute, out there, although not to the point that Transcona's vote would have overwhelmed the rest of the city and swept him in if he'd ran for Mayor of Winnipeg. But he's still the big Transconan kahuna, the leader of a small but dedicated faction, his leadership virtually unchallenged.

Aside from the occasional news story and a snide joke or two, Winnipeg proper essentially treating Transcona like Canada treats Newfoundland, you really don't hear from or about the neighbourhood too often. Well, maybe they just need some marketing! The "Park City" slogan may or may not have been officially phased out when the neighbourhood joined Winnipeg in Unicity, but if the Transconans ever feel a rebrand coming on, I have but one humble suggestion:

Trans-co-naaaaaa! More Than Meets The Eye!

And, yes, these are the kind of lengths I will go in the name of a one-line gag. It was only once I started drawing this picture that I then pieced together the obvious follow-up of "Optiruss Wyatt", so... that made it a two-line gag.

Coming up tomorrow: Optiruss Wyatt fanfiction! ha ha ha ha ha ha okay, no, not really, tomorrow is actually something else entirely. I had you going for a second there, though!

Follow Friday Comes Early

2011-06-08T23:31:00.001-05:00

A bit of administrative business, if I may.

"Follow Friday" -- commonly #followfriday or #ff -- is that hashtagged Twitter concept that never quite works correctly because people cram their remaining 130-odd characters full of seemingly random names with no explanatory notes, and then you just walk away from Twitter entirely for the day because the majority of your feed is underlined blue gibberish. But the idea is a sound one, the intention being to twig readers and passersby to new, noteworthy, and/or high-quality sources of content.

You will note in the sidebar to your right (which is also my right, in the medium of text, but never mind that) that a most handy blog list does its best to keep tabs on local blogger activity and indicate when new content arrives. But a few of those entries are starting to look a little long in the tooth, over there, and I'm sure that in the meantime a lot of neat new blogs have risen up and established themselves as points of interest.

The more astute of you will already have noted that Follow Friday is intended for, well, Fridays. But I am nothing if not a rebellious sort! A... rebellious sort who coincidentally already has his posts of the day planned out for tomorrow and for Friday, but who needs something to talk about in the meantime. Look, you take your rebellions where you can get them, I mean you can't just--

ANYWAY

tl;dr My blogroll is rapidly aging and forever incomplete, and I can handle that first issue myself, but the second issue is one that works better as a team project. So! Gandering as we are at said blog list, what noteworthy upstarts am I missing? Which consistently excellent Manitoban bloggers have you readers recently taken to following, and who deserves more credit than they've been getting? Drop me some recommendations! Help a Brother Out!

Still in the Minors with a Hat of Olde

2011-06-07T23:38:00.003-05:00

Our story begins -- or, at least, I became aware that it had begun -- on the evening of December 11th, 2010. Another wintry Saturday night with hockey on the television as the main attraction, usually the case once the evening lows start hitting thirty below. Without windchill. (Enjoy summer while it's here, guys. I get it, there are bugs. Quit complaining.)

The latter half of CBC's weekly doubleheader that evening was a game in Vancouver, with the Tampa Bay Lightning playing a rare out-of-conference game against the Canucks. And what should I see during the third period, what confounding visual should grace my eyes but this:

Neil Young wearing a Manitoba Moose hat.

Neil Young wearing a Manitoba Moose hat?

It was a strange and, at the time, unfamiliar sight. Now, we here in Winnipeg like to claim Neil Young as one of our own, not because he was born here (he wasn't; he was born in Toronto) or raised here (he wasn't, at least not much; he was already fifteen by the time he moved here with his mother) or because he graduated from school here (he didn't; he dropped out of Kelvin) or lived here for very long (he didn't -- especially considering he was touring full-time by the age of twenty) or because he currently lives here now (he doesn't), but because he lived here very briefly and then subsequently became famous. Those are the two keys; master those and you will be beloved here forever. Hell, even if you don't have that first one covered, our Mayor will give you a key to the city anyway.

So we in Winnipeg make a big honkin' deal out of our connection to Neil Young, but aside from a song or two every couple decades the connection is rarely reciprocated. So it was nice to see him make the effort, although... the Moose hat still doesn't make sense. A Moose hat? I doubt very strongly that NHL teams hock their AHL affiliates' gear in their arena stores, so he would have had to get it somewhere else -- but when would he have been to a Moose game? Young packed up and left the city about forty years before the Moose ever existed; for that matter, Young was gone by the time the original WHA Jets were established. The only hat that wouldn't have been a time paradox is a Blue Bombers hat, but then I guess that's not really a thing you wear to a hockey game. (Though I'm sure somebody will have proven me wrong within the first five home games our new NHL team plays. "You want me to buy a new hat? What is this, New York?")

At the time I ended up just kind of shrugging and thinking, whatever, I guess somebody sent him a Moose hat and he figured that he may as well wear it to their parent club's home game. Either that or someone plopped it on his head while he was asleep, which would have been an equally plausible explanation for that picture above.

The important takeaway from this backstory is -- this was in December, and at the time it seemed odd. Since then Neil Young has popped up on camera at regular-season and at playoff hockey games at least half a dozen more times -- most of them at San Jose Sharks games, in California, where he actually lives -- and every time he's been spotted in a hockey arena, he has been wearing that same Manitoba Moose hat. Unless it isn't the same hat, and he just happens to own five or six of the exact same hat. Every time, though, it's a Moose hat -- even though you would figure the home team(s) would have thought to offer him their own hat by now -- and every time he pops up, a new group of people are bewildered by the hat. (If you happen to have a Twitter account, there's a pretty good chance you've heard about at least one of these sightings.)

And, since Neil Young is the man who wrote "Heart of Gold", I was pretty well ready to leave it at that. So he wears the hat of a team he's probably never seen, from a city he lived in for less time than most of his other addresses, to every hockey game! Maybe this is how he dresses up. Given enough time I'm sure we all could have embraced it as a charming quirk, an idiosyncrasy of genius that gives us one more tenuous thread with which to claim our connection to him.

But then! But then.

But then the website of Rolling Stone Magazine put up a photo gallery of musician sightings, and we found out the terrible truth:

It isn't actually a hockey thing; he just wears that hat everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. Nobody has seen the top of his head since December of last year.

This is sort of a problem, because eww -- but also, and more importantly, because True North Sports and Entertainment has since returned Winnipeg to the big leagues with the purchase of an NHL team and thus has made arrangements to ship the Moose out to Newfoundland. The Manitoba Moose, that particular combination of place and name, no longer exists; it is a defunct team, and our most beloved temporarily-loaned celebrity is in danger of becoming no better than the ratty hipsters who will start wearing Manitoba Moose gear just to be different.

Mister Neil Young, here is my offer; I believe it to be a reasonable one, and I hope that you will consider it. When the name and logo of Winnipeg's new NHL team is finally disclosed, and when merchandise for that team becomes available, I will pay out of my own pocket for a new hat and have it delivered to the address of your choosing to replace your Manitoba Moose hat. You don't have to wear it everywhere all the time -- in fact, please don't -- but it would give me the peace of mind that your prairie shout-out representation is current and up to date, and it would give you... well, you'd get a new hat. I don't think there's too much more to explain on that end of the deal.

Unless they actually do name the team something stupid like the "Polar Bears", in which case, wow. Forget that. Just keep the Moose hat; it'll be for the best.

Wednesday is the Winnipeg Internet Pundits UMFM Open House Show

2011-06-06T21:08:00.001-05:00

Bloggers, locals, fameseekers -- lend me your ears!

As part of UMFM's continuing Open House to show off its revamped (and very nice!) studios, the Winnipeg Internet Pundits show is throwing open its proverbial doors as well to any local writers who might care to drop by. Three minutes of airtime will be awarded to any blogger who drops by during the show; there will also be ample opportunity to kick around and chime in during the rest of the broadcast, and I am reasonably certain that there will also be beer afterwards at the neighbouring Degrees.

Not a bad deal, right? So come on down! Winnipeg Internet Pundits and the UMFM open house, this Wednesday from 5:00 to 6:00 PM, with the blogging equivalent of the Bat-Signal lit up above the studio. (Christian suggests that I may be shirtless during the broadcast, but he's just joshin' around; anybody who knows me is well aware that I am far more likely to be pantsless.) Even if you aren't a blogger or won't have time to drop by, be sure to listen in; I suspect that this ought to be quite the entertaining broadcast.

So be ready for Winnipeg Internet Pundits! If this isn't Manitoba's sexiest political panel, I don't know what is!

Please Remove Your Hats and Rise for Our Eventual Civic Anthem

2011-06-05T23:46:00.002-05:00

My daily posting thus far has kind of been nightly posting instead, but Daily Post Month continues regardless! Which is good, because we're five days in, and if I had already managed to screw that up I would just walk right off the internet and never be seen again.

Anyway -- hey, you know what I think would be fun to write? An anthem.

I've always been a sucker for national anthems and flags, as I'm sure has become obvious every time I've written anything about the Olympics. ("That flag has an AK-47 on it? AWESOME") Every anthem and every flag has its own historical connotations and interesting stories, and fascinations like these probably explain pretty well why History was one of my undergraduate majors. And I've always thought it's interesting that flags are just all over the place -- from the biggest nation to the tiniest little podunk town -- but anthems, with certain exceptions, really only occur at the federal level.

I mention this largely because of the video game Just Cause 2, which I'd say is easily one of my favourite games of this console generation. I could gush at length about the gameplay, graphics, atmosphere, art design, writing, and overall complete fun of the game, but that would take too long for what I'm trying to do here. Ask me later about it, maybe. But what I want to mention here in particular is the music, because there were some very clever musical flourishes involved in this game.

The central premise is that you play as an American agent dropped onto a fictional East Indies nation that has decided to rebel against its previous loyalty to the States, so your job is to blow stuff up and aid various rebel forces and do whatever else is necessary to destabilize the new government and reestablish American influence in the region. And that angle is played entirely sardonically, so you know this kind of thing is right up my alley. But if you're going to make up a fictional country for an interactive medium, you have to aim to create the immersive details that wouldn't normally be a problem with books or other storytelling outlets.

So what did the game's music composers do? They wrote a national anthem. Just straight-up created one, which is not something people get to do just every day.

And of course this would be for the kind of dictatorial little nation that would include it before every national media broadcast--

--and little production touches like that always just make me really happy.

The idea of just casually writing an anthem, busting one out like nothing, also reminded me of how impressed I was when I found out that legendary film composer Ennio Morricone wrote a bombastic march anthem for the 1978 World Cup in Argentina:

So good! Now, I am definitely no Ennio Morricone, and I am certainly no Mats Lundgren or Anders Ehlin either. But if dudes out there can put together national-anthem-sounding arrangements for World Cups and for completely fictional countries, I know I'd definitely enjoy trying to put one together for a town.

Usually one commissions this sort of thing, but I am from Winnipeg and Winnipeg is as stubbornly DIY a city as you will find, so I am going to just wham at it myself with a tiny USB keyboard until something that sounds like an anthem comes out. My big dilemma, though, is whether to write lyrics for it or not. Because, on the one hand, what kind of stupid anthem wouldn't have lyrics? But on the other hand, I am self-aware enough to know what kind of a jerk I am, and it is exactly kind of jerk who would shoehorn in some sarcastic lyrics and gum up a perfectly good anthem.

So that's one of my future projects, down the line; it won't happen today, and it won't happen tomorrow, but one day you will hear the patriotic (is there an equivalent of patriotism for cities? You get the idea) strains of a glorious anthem and know that the anthem has been written for us lunatic Winnipeg guerrillas. Then you can stand, or not stand, I don't know, whatever; the customs for this sort of thing are pretty much unexplored. I guess we'll find out!

Help a Brother Out: I Clicked a Square and the Smiley Face Guy Turned His Eyes into Xes Like He's Dead, Does That Mean I Win, Did I Beat the Game

2011-06-04T23:28:00.003-05:00

You are about to be privy to one of my many shameful and potentially compromising secrets, one of the psychological scars and mental torments that eats away at my very soul each and every day to irreparably wound my interpersonal relations with all around me. I share this with you in the utmost confidence, on the internet, and I hope dearly that somebody can help to ease the continual disgrace and dismay that such a failing incurs on my person each day I walk this earth.

Ladies and gentlemen:

Help a Brother Out!

You know Minesweeper, that abstract minefield-simulator video game that has come standard with every Windows release since 1992?

How in the fuck do you play this game?

The standard-issue card games, your Solitaires and Freecells and whatnot, I can wrap my head around those like nothing and just beat them mercifully. Even Hearts, and Hearts is just complete bullshit. But Minesweeper? Holy god, entire decades' worth of my life spent on Windows machines (really already a waste to begin with) and I have just never had any idea what of anything is going on in Minesweeper.

I'll click somewhere, and a number will appear. A two? Great! Are those points? Do I work towards a high score? Does a three mean I'm doing better, or worse? So I'll click somewhere else on the board, it can really just be anywhere, and then BAM WHOOPS IT IS A MINE and I have sent the smiley face at the top of the window to a hellish early grave. He will never see his wife and children again, because I clicked here instead of there and explosions happened.

So I'll start another game, click somewhere on completely misguided instinct, and then HOORAY A THIRD OF THE BOARD IS EMPTY SPACE NOW. A whole bunch of numbers appear, hopefully for the high score, and then apparently I'm not allowed to just take the points and end the game there so I click somewhere else aaaaaaaaaaand get a one. Hooray! Look at this roll I'm on, there's no way anything can LOL WHOOPS HIT A MINE GAME OVER and another dead smiley face hits my lifetime pile of squandered yellow soldiers, a pile currently sitting somewhere around fifteen or twenty corpses for all the times in my life I have ever attempted Minesweeper. I have never won; I'm not entirely sure I would know what winning would look like.

It's not like I didn't try to figure it out! Normally -- this is not a technique you are advised to rely on academically, but normally -- you can gleam a better understanding of something from its Wikipedia page, but instead I get helpful game tips like this:

"Minesweeper can be modeled as algebra of binary variables with some exception that it does not possess a unique solution all the time. At such cases, the player has to guess for the location of a mine. See below for an example of a case that the player has to guess. See board puzzles with algebra of binary variables for reducing the minesweeper locally into algebra of binary variables."

and

"If you have two adjacent numbers, the difference between those numbers is equal to the difference in the number of mines for the 3 squares adjacent to each that are not adjacent to the other number. For example: if these numbers differ by 3, all of the adjacent squares to the higher number not shared by the other are mines, and all the opposite ones are safe."

oh well why didn't you say so

This may seem like a strange thing to be hung up on, but I might need this someday, dadgum it. I'm an information professional, and unemployed! Dudes out there in the world are being turned down for jobs because of their Myers-Briggs Type Indicators as we speak, and if people can get turned down for crap like that then I am justified in my nightmarish visions of losing an employment opportunity because I am the one idiot in the world who can't click anything but mines.

So help a brother out! If you are a Minesweeper shark, expert, guru or enthusiast, I would appreciate whatever you can tell me to make me better at this stupid frigging game that I don't understand and that will surely one day leave me a broken and bitter vagabond. Throw me a bone, here!