the pod bay door

¦¦ The brain functions better with sleep, of which I have not been getting much lately. Today at work the world was spinning too quickly – so much paper pushing. Yeesh.

¦¦ Librarians looking for an interesting sig file can check Lib.Sigs., “Quotations for Librarians’ E-mail Signature Files”. The latest entry comes from the Oscars, courtesy of Michael Moore: “We like nonfiction, and we live in fictitious times.”

¦¦ Speaking of Michael Moore’s Oscar acceptance speech, this evening I watched a video of the IFP Independent Spirit Awards, which were handed out on Saturday night, the day before the Oscars. Moore won an award there as well, and his acceptance speech was essentially the same one he gave at the Academy Awards, but longer and more drawn out, as he didn’t face a time constraint, and the attendees, independent filmmakers, writers, actors, etc., were on his side for the most part. The nominees and award winners are listed here.

¦¦ Remember Clonaid and their claims of having created clone babies? Apparently this is a picture of the third one. What, you thought there were only two clone babies? Well, try five.

¦¦ Tired of the one-sided tv coverage of the war on Iraq? I’m disgusted with the coverage on CNN today, broadcasting interviews with families of captured US soldiers – what horse pucky! One interviewer asked a father if he’d prefer to have his son released. Well, DUH! Hey, can we get a few more retired generals on board? Cheer up and read You Might Be A Right Wing Republican If …

¦¦ The Edmonton Journal published a feature on blogging in the Friday 14 March 2003 edition. Written by Mairi MacLean, the two pieces feature comments from a number of locals, including Geoff, Robert (in Lethbridge), Jen, myself, and a mention of Kelly‘s site as well. Given the small amount of coverage available in a newspaper, I thought Mairi did a good job introducing blogging to the EJ readers. My only quibble: the URLs for the websites mentioned were not included in the print or online(!) versions of the articles.

¦¦ In the world of You-Gotta-Be-Sh*tting-Me, a woman in Germany began emerging from a 6-year coma when her parents took her Regensburg to listen to a Bryan Adams concert. My favorite take on the story left me in tears from laughing. Previously Bryan Adams was known only for Waking Up The Neighbours, not comatose fans. Meanwhile, in Kenya, sadly, three people died trying to retrieve a mobile phone that fell into an open-pit latrine.

¦¦ It’s unfortunate that you need to subscribe to read stories from the NYTimes Magazine online. The March 9 issue features three fascinating articles on: face transplant surgery, “smart-mobbing” the antiwar movement, and a disturbing piece on Mel Gibson and his father, orthodox Catholic theologian Hutton Gibson. Discussed is The Passion, Mel Gibson’s upcoming movie on the last 12 hours of the life of Christ, with the actors speaking in Latin and Aramic only. There will be no subtitles. “Gibson has has said that he hopes to depict Christ’s ordeal using ‘filmic storytelling techniques’ that will make the understanding of the dialogue uncessary.” (NYTimes, 9 March 02, p53) The publication of the article has infuriated the younger Gibson. What is disturbing about the article in the NYTimes Magazine are some of Hutton Gibson’s beliefs such as: the Sept 11 jets were not flown by Al-Qaeda operatives but were remote-controlled, and that the Holocaust never happened.

¦¦ Why are there not enough hours in the day to do what you want to do?

¦¦ Forthcoming project: to record in a notepad every song that appears in my head in one day from wakeup in the morning to going to sleep at night the same day.

¦¦ It’s lunchtime here at the ol’ SciTech Library, and as I munch down my spinach salad, covered with cooked chicken breast, tomato, and shredded mild cheddar cheese, I discovered a story that makes me so proud to have been born and raised in Manitoba. A pizza delivery driver in Selkirk MB, also a single mother, stopped to help a gunshot victim, and was dismissed from her job shortly afterwards. In fact, her boss had driven by and saw her before she’d even left the scene. He stopped and told a policeman that she would be dismissed. The manager noted: “She wasn’t dismissed because she was at the shooting scene,” he said. “She was away from her job for no good reason” (my highlight).

The story is receiving North American press coverage. The Winnipeg Sun received dozens of e-mails denouncing the restaurants owners and calling for a boycott.

Now that’s compassion defined, dontcha think? I hope the residents in Selkirk rally around her, and stop buying pies from Frank’s Pizza. Maybe it needs a new slogan: Our Pies Are Delivered Hot, Unless You Get Shot. The story has been picked up internationally, and the manager, Jason Boyd, is getting skewered royally. Read some of the comments on Foodinc.ca. I encourage you to submit comments here as well.

¦¦ With all due respect to my many dear American friends, occasionally you shake your head in disbelief at what some of them do to get attention, especially in the name of so-called patriotism. Will the “average” American ever learn that there is sentient life outside the 48 contiguous, and, gosh darn it, that it matters too?

¦¦ Another pronouncement from the established media that blogging is now mainstream.

¦¦ Late night musical discovery: Secondsight, from North Carolina.

¦¦ It makes good sense that my friend and colleague Stephen Abram is a member of the Internet Librarian Hall of Fame. My question is: how does one qualify, and who makes decision to induct?

¦¦ It was great to see SNL pay tribute last Saturday to Fred Rogers. Horatio Sanz sat on stage near the end and sang a song in his honour. In the past, SNL skewered him mercilessly, the high water mark being the early 1980’s with Eddie Murphy, when he did Mr Robinson’s Neighborhood. National Lampoon was in on it as well, satirizing him on one of their first albums. Read a most heartfelt tribute to Rogers from PopMatters.

¦¦ Make your own online kaleidoscope! The Internet justs gets better every day.

¦¦ So it’s come to this: in the USA, you must use caution when wearing a t-shirt that reads: Give Peace A Chance and Peace on Earth. A 60-year old lawyer was arrested in a mall in Albany NY for refusing to remove his t-shirt, featuring the aforemention phrases. His 31-year old son avoided arrest by removing his t-shirt, which read, No War With Iraq and Let Inspections Work. The capper: he bought the t-shirt in a store in the mall. The good news is the mall owner has dropped the charges after protestors entered the mall wearing similar t-shirts, and refused to leave until the charges were dropped; what’s insane is that the charges were ever laid in the first place.

Since Sept 11 2001, free speech is America isn’t as free as it was once perceived to be. I watched Politically Incorrect the first night it was back on the air after the attacks, and heard Bill Maher suggest that the pilots of those planes were not cowards, but that the American military was, for lobbing missles from hundreds of miles away. He was admonished by Ari Fleischer, in what smacked as censorship from the White House.
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¦¦ Indeed it is. The highlight today was a haircut at 10:00 am. But I digress. Ten years ago, when AAA radio began to take off in North America, I lamented in a letter to the Edmonton Journal that no such station was to be found in these here parts. Around that time, Calgary and Vancouver had AAA stations (Mix 1060, Coast 1040), but both were relegated to the AM band, rather than FM, and they could not build an audience big enough or sell enough advertising to stay solvent. Mix 1060’s playlist was so diverse and interesting that one time on a trip from Edmonton to Calgary, I listed every song they played in three hours to get a sense of the range of music, and I was impressed. My letter drew a response from the then-pop music writer, Helen Metella, who agreed. However, she interviewed local rock FM music directors, who insisted such a format would never work in Edmonton.

It’s ten years later, and Edmonton still features five faceless, interchangable pop-rock FM stations, populated by idiot djs, with playlists as bland as you can imagine. K-97 likes to play a lot of Supertramp, and 100.3 enjoys hitting us with Zeppelin. Hey, I like LZ, but time and a place, guys, ok?

Well, I should maybe make that 4.5 stations. A few days ago, Mix 96 because 96X, The Hit Music Alternative. I’ve listened to it for four days, while driving, and can report that the playlist is, well, diverse and interesting. There are problems, of course: the djs still talk to us like we’re 10-year olds, and often they will not tell you the name and/or song title of the tune(s) just played. This infuriates me – the Calgary and Vancouver stations always listed the song info after a set of tunes. Regardless, I hope they survive, and do well, if only because they’ve already been dissed by the sockheads at 100.3 – the radio station that growls at you 300x a day.

¦¦ While searching for info on AAA stations, I came across a web site called EdmontonStories.com. It is set in MT, and is a site to which readers can contribute Edmonton stories. It looks new, and I don’t think anyone other than designer has posted yet. Among the links there is one to another Edmonton blog, from Ray vanderWoning, rightfully titled Caustic Sense. This is why. So I look at the bottom page, and read “This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.” I am further intrigued to read about what they are:

“Creative Commons has developed a Web application that helps people dedicate their creative works to the public domain — or retain their copyright while licensing them as free for certain uses, on certain conditions. Unlike the GNU GPL, Creative Commons licenses are not be designed for software, but rather for other kinds of creative works: websites, scholarship, music, film, photography, literature, courseware, etc. We hope to build upon and complement the work of others who have created public licenses for a variety of creative works.”

Watch an animated short about their mission (complete with cheesy roller-rink organ). Creative Commons wants to help us “skip the intermediary”, i.e., copyright. CC wants to help you let others make “some use” of your creativity on the internet, without having to jump through legal hoops. If copyright is a red light saying “stop”, CC is the green light, saying “c’mon in.” Their licences are explained here. CC has its own blog as well.

I think this is a great idea, long overdue. Copyright is important and necessary, but can be stifling and suffocating. CC is an US-based initiative, and I am not sure if it can applies outside that jurisidiction, but their licences are being used by non-Americans.

I also note that the Creative Commons movement is old news, from 2002, and I wasn’t surprised to learn that it is chaired by Lawrence Lessig. To those of you already familiar with CC, thanks for your patience.