Hey all,
Whether you and your family celebrate Saturnalia or some more faddish modern tradition, have a really good one. Let’s all meet back here afterwards and swap some delightful tales OK?
You’re the best,
J. Whiting
I’m not sure if it’s because their budget has been slashed by 1/3 since 1990, but our national broadcaster is leading the charge into the 1800s.
On November 28th, I sent the e-mail below to the CBC radio show The House. They just got back to me today… Over three weeks later. Wow. That’s sub Pony Express type speed…
11/28/06 10:50 AM
To: thehouse@cbc.ca
From: me
Subject: Justice Minister Vic Toews’ interview.Justice Minister Vic Toews’ push for harsher impaired driving legislation smacks of “truthiness”.
Toews failed to mention how many accidents on Canadian roads are the result of recreational drug use. Do these numbers justify the time, cost, energy and encroachment of Charter rights that would be required to enforce the new legislation?
Sure, it feels like a good idea to crack down on drug-impaired driving, but “from the gut” legislation results in laws that are more based on partisan optics than on genuine problem solving.
Jason Whiting (rhymes with “lighting”)
Montreal
22 days later I received this in my inbox.
12/20/06 04:52 PM
To: me
From: thehouse@cbc.ca
Subject: Re: Justice Minister Vic Toews’ interview.Dear Jason Whiting:
Thank you for your thoughtful comments and your interest in our programme.
Your feedback helps to shape our thinking for each and every show. Our listeners define the program and we appreciate the time you have taken to respond to what you have heard.
Thanks for listening!
Best regards,
Althia Raj
Associate Producer
The House
Maybe the CBC is too busy chasing down “news” stories like why serial killers target prostitutes. Brutal.
On November 27th, I wrote about Laurie David’s Washington Post op-ed piece on the National Science Teachers Association’s refusal to distribute 50,000 copies of An Inconvenient Truth to its high school science teaching members.
Since then, I have followed the ensuing shit-storm with interest as it played out on Laurie David’s Huffington Post blog and on the NSTA’s website.
Being a former journalist, I decided to get in touch with the NSTA myself and ask a few questions. Specifically I was interested in knowing how they had arrived at the 2001 anti-endorsement policy that they give as the primary reason for not distributing the DVDs.
When the NSTA sent me this flimsy document I left them a phone message requesting more details.
The man at the centre of the controversy, Dr. Gerry Wheeler himself, called me back to talk about it.
The NSTA’s Executive Director told me that the his agency doesn’t keep detailed minutes from board meetings, but that he had been the board member to make the recommendation to terminate NSTA endorsements and that to the best of his memory:
At that time [the NSTA] had about 5 or six products or services that we had endorsed […] and what I was recommending was that we didn’t have the expertise or resources on-staff to go and look at all these things and that we’d be better off to just take the high-road and have a policy not to endorse anything.
Fair enough. But the producers of An Inconvenient Truth weren’t asking for an endorsement were they? Dr. Wheeler:
If you’re a member and I send you [the DVD] without you asking, my interpretation of that is it’s an endorsement. […] My guess is that [Laurie David] wanted to say, “NSTA thought this was so important, they sent it to all their members.”
Dr. Wheeler talked about NSTA’s offer to put up a link on the NSTA website and have science teachers request copies directly. He didn’t think Laurie David wanted to go for that because:
She didn’t want to give away all those DVDs. She just wanted a finite number to be given out by the NSTA. […] She’s a multimillionaire who doesn’t like to hear the word no and it’s really done a hell of a lot of damage.
And what does he feel about global warming?
Endorsing or not endorsing a movie about global warming by Al Gore is not the same as saying global warming is important or not important. […] Global warming is important and CO2 buildup is true.
Good to know where he stands on all of this, but Dr. Wheeler’s organisation does continue to receive millions of dollars from the oil industry, and despite his insistence that this is “no strings attached” money, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Still, I gotta give the guy props for calling me back to talk about it.
Next up on the hotseat: Laurie David. We’ll see if she returns my calls…
Have a great weekend!
Last night I tried out some new Christmas material at the Comedyworks and thought it would be fun to turn these performances into podcasts.
iTunes users can subscribe to the new SDtSU podcast by clicking here. You can also download the mp3 here and can subscribe to this feed as a podcast by copying this link into your podcast player.
Like I said to one of my buddies last night, I always aim to learn at least one thing every time I get up on stage. Last night I learned the lesson that George W. Bush is currently being taught: have a good exit strategy…
Thanks for listening and if you want to catch me live, here’s where I’m going to be performing tomorrow night.
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If Boing Boing has taught us anything, it’s that unintentional goatse parodies are pretty funny.
Check out this impressive six-person multicultural goastse on the Liberal Party of Canada’s contribute page!
Hey everybody, our first-ever contest is still on here at SDtSU!
Tegann found the first typo:
The poll showed Tory support at 17 per cent and the NDP at sex per cent.
One typo still remains to be found in this article. Can you find it?
Hey, it’s time for the first-ever contest here on SDtSU!
Johnny (pictured at left on his recent honeymoon in Scotland) forwarded me a Canada.com article containing at least two comically serendipitous typos.
Can you spot them?
If you catch one of the typos, report back in this post’s comment section and you could win an exciting (not-so-exciting) prize!
Two typos, two prizes, two winners. (Two men enter, one man leaves…)
The contest prize category this week?
Books that other people thought were good, me not so much.
The books are:
and
Stéphane Dion was large and in charge during his Peter Mansbridge interview on The National last night (follow the But before I go any further, I’d like to say that for a publicly owned institution, CBC News does a bad job of enabling users to share its content (and they’re not alone, I’m looking at you CTV and Global ).
CBC News: you’re not a movie studio or musician. You’re a taxpayer funded democracy-enabler and you should be doing everything in your power to give Canadians the ability to easily share your material with each other and the rest of the world. (Go make a deal with your unions & advertisers and then make your news always available on the Web please in an easy-to-link-to way.)
OK. Now on to the Dion interview… and here’s the thing: I don’t have much to say. You just gotta watch it. UPDATE: CBC removed the link.
It has been so long (never?) since I’ve felt inspired like this by anyone, never mind a politician. You get the sense that Dion is not only deeply informed, knowledgeable and vision-driven, but that he genuinely cares about Canada and Canadians. He’s purposeful and honest and even displays a gentle sense of humour.
What more can I say? I want him to lead this country. Hell, I want him to lead me. I literally got choked up at one point while he was talking about the future of Canada. If Dion can maintain even a fraction of this momentum, Stephen Harper is fucked.
So, the script for that good cause animation is coming along. A bit tighter than the last incarnation. Funnier? I don’t know… Trying to do funny stuff for the government is, I’m learning, a bit tricky. (One woman on the review committee apparently said “Everyone watches Trading Spaces!”)
Sigh.
Here’s the latest version (sorry for the doc link — I was getting frustrated trying to mess with the formatting and went for the easiest option…).
Lately things have been slanting a bit political on Sitting Down to Stand Up, so here’s a comedy link that I know at least one person will love…
Via Boing Boing: Divine Fart mural at Boston Contemporary Arts museum
For those of you not living in Montreal/not reading Montreal’s alt-weeklies, the Montreal Mirror’s cover story last week does a good job of summing up how I feel about Justice Minister Rick Toews’ proposed new anti-impaired driving legislation.
Marc-Boris St-Maurice, the founder of Bloc Pot, current Liberal Party member and executive director of NORML Canada is quoted as saying:
Looks to me like a sneaky way to modify the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. It’s a roundabout way to increase penalties without opening up the debate on drugs…. [The legislation] is a little premature and half-cocked.
Read the article here.
Like I said in an earlier post, I went out on Monday night to see Jeanne play some songs with her dad at the Wheel Club’s Hillbilly Night.
A friend of Jeanne’s from Toronto, Richard Ferren, is staying with us and he came along sporting a Stephane Dion pin that he picked up at the Liberal convention. (Richard is a card-carrying Liberal who was supporting Dion from the very beginning.)
When we got to the Wheel Club, Richard’s pin caught the eye of a fiery middle-aged woman who, it turns out, works in Stepane Dion’s office, which until recently was a very intimate affair (4 or 5 people).
This politically passionate woman sat down at our table and Richard and I proceeded to ask her questions for the rest of the night. (I was so engrossed in the conversation, Jeanne was worried that I’d miss her set.)
So what did the Liberal lady say? Well, a lot. And all of it positive. And why am I excited about it? Because she was so genuine. A “low” level staffer who was inspired and gave us a privileged glimpse behind-the-scenes of someone who is suddenly one of Canada’s most powerful political leaders.
So, again, what did she say?
First of all, some stuff that everyone already knows…
This is great news.
At the risk of having this blog veer dangerously off course, I wanted to give a shout out the white geek equivalent of a shout out (a w00t?) to Mayor Michael Bloomberg and NYC’s “activist health commissioner”, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden.
NYC is going to ban most trans fats from restaurants, including little restaurants like, oh I don’t know, McDonald’s.
This issue is dear to my heart because the way we’ve been operating up ’til now is completely fucking insane.
We know that trans fats cause heart attacks. That is non-disputed scientific fact. So why are foods containing trans fat still available in supermarkets? Is it alright to kill people if you do it real slow? Can you imagine what would happen if food companies were knowingly using an ingredient that was proven to cause cancer?
Trans fats cause thousands of unnecessary deaths every year. The stuff should be marked with a skull and crossbones symbol.
And what chaps my ass so sharply about this whole issue is that that food companies know all about the poisonous effects of trans fats. They’ve known for a long time.
For years the food companies have been coasting along, content with the knowledge that most people didn’t know that the stuff they were eating was killing them (people find it hard to be food science experts when they’re trying to raise kids and pay the mortgage and distracting stuff like that).
It’s only when governmental heath agencies here and in the U.S. passed legislation forcing disease food factories to start labeling the presence and amount of trans fats in their products that any of them started doing anything about it. And that’s not surprising really, when you consider that these big companies have a history of knowingly, willfully putting profit ahead of human health. (Kraft is owned by a tobacco company for fuck’s sake.)
Anyhow, bravo NYC. You are going to provide a powerful example for the rest of the world.
From the NYT piece, here’s the deal with trans fats:
Trans fats are the chemically modified food ingredients that raise levels of a particularly unhealthy form of cholesterol and have been squarely linked to heart disease. Long used as a substitute for saturated fats in baked goods, fried foods, salad dressings, margarine and other foods, trans fats also have a longer shelf life than other alternatives.
Today I handed in the first draft for a fun little script that’s going to be animated by the same gang that did this amazing spoof on what Quebecers call the Night of the Long Knives.
What I like most about this project is who it’s for and who I’m working with.
The client is Imagine Canada, a group that helps charities and nonprofit organizations “fulfill their missions”. IC hired an amazing young Montreal media company called Blue Horizon Media to get the word out about their new Web site initiative called Values Added and BHM got in touch with me to flesh out the concept and write the script.
I had a great time chatting with Blue Horizon Media’s Creative Director Pablo Salzman who talked about his company’s socially conscious ethos. Among many other things, Pablo said, “We run a not-just-for-profit company.” Excellent.
I’m going to post more about Blue Horizon in the future. I’m especially excited to talk about their project to create a sort of MySpace for people who want to make the world a better place, but I’m running out of time. (Jeanne is playing at the Wheel Club with her dad and I’m late.)
If you want to read the first draft of the script, I’ve put it underneath here, “below the fold”.
Hey, guess what happens when you go up against Big Oil in George W’s America?
For 22 years, Bobby Maxwell (pictured above) combed through the books of major oil producers. Maxwell’s job was to keep tabs on the billions of dollars worth of oil and gas that oil companies were extracting from land and coastal waters belonging to the U.S. tax-paying public. Along the way, Maxwell and his team uncovered hundreds of millions of dollars worth of royalties that oil companies were keeping from the American people.
In 2003, Bobby Maxwell received a citation from Gale A. Norton, who was secretary of the interior at the time. Norton said that “Mr. Maxwell’s career has been characterized by exceptional performance and significant contributions.” Norton went on to praise Maxwell’s “perseverance and leadership” while detailing his “many outstanding achievements.”
So what happened next? You guessed it. He was fired.
From the NYT piece:
Less than two years [after receiving his citation], the Interior Department eliminated his job in what it called a “reorganization.” That came exactly one week after a federal judge in Denver unsealed a lawsuit in which Mr. Maxwell contended that a major oil company had spent years cheating on royalty payments.
And check out this other blood-boiling graf from the Times piece:
In February, the Interior Department admitted that energy companies might escape more than $7 billion in royalty payments over the next five years because of errors in leases signed in the 1990s that officials are now scrambling to renegotiate. The errors were discovered in 2000, but were ignored for the next six years and have yet to be fixed.
This shit has got to stop.
(Maxwell is currently unemployed and in court, fighting one particular oil company who he claims still owes the government millions of dollars. The company looks like they want to settle out of court. Under the whistleblower legislation, Maxwell might be entitled to as much as 30% of the earnings that are owed to the government, which would make him a wealthy man. Packback’s a bitch. Hope he comes out on top.)
Alright, is it just me or were Barack Obama and The Rock separated at birth? Has anyone ever seen these two together? The Democratic Party darling and the Check out Obama’s appearance on Leno below, and then compare to this YouTube interview with Dwane Johnson.
Meanwhile, up here in the land of the bland and the boring, the new leader of the Liberal Party had “such a surprise win, [he] may well have written his victory speech on the way to the podium.
You've stumbled upon the virtual home of the writer, blogger and sometimes performer J. Whiting.
I use this site to write about what's going on in my professional, and sometimes private, life. This space also allows me to sound off about things that I'm passionate about like sensible political policy, the Internet and the environment.
Thanks for stopping by.
J.
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