Random Saturday Chirps

Well, president turtleneck is staying put--at least for now. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is claiming he won yesterday's election, and his victory has been endorsed by Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Of course, there's one teensy weensy catch: supporters of the defeated candidates don't believe the result and say the election was stolen. And now they're rioting in the streets. (Guardian)

Good golly gee whiz, who would've thought a theocracy with a "supreme leader" would have a controversial election result?

Meanwhile, you might've heard, and there's even a slim chance you might actually care, that U.S President Barack Obama picked a female, Hispanic judge for the U.S. Supreme Court late last month. Saggy-faced conservatives whiteys have been flipping out over Sonia Sotomayor's nomination, saying it's racist and affirmative action and yadda yadda discrimination boo hoo.

Well today, Pat Buchanan, a conservative asshat who once suggested a Great Wall-esque barrier be built between the United States and Canada, has a column on Sotomayor where he challenges the legitimacy of her education at Princeton and says, uh...

"This is bigotry pure and simple. To salve their consciences for past societal sins, the Ivy League is deep into discrimination again, this time with white males as victims rather than as beneficiaries.

One prefers the old bigotry. At least it was honest, and not, as Abraham Lincoln observed, adulterated "with the base alloy of hypocrisy."

Of course the "old bigotry" had lynchings and murders and people weren't allowed to vote based on their gender and/or the colour of their skin. The "old bigotry" pretty much sucked.

Oh--Buchanan also insults Sotomayor for improving her English by reading English-language children's books. A bold position to take seeing how, far as I can tell, Buchanan only speaks one language.

Wouldn't it be great if U.S. media could stop handing radio gigs, news shows and column inches to the conservative movement's viscious and crazy bullies? Miserable white dudes like Buchanan, Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh have spent their lives making this world a more frightened and unhappy place. They're like the angry, racist uncle who ruins everyone's holiday dinner. Blecch. Time to stop inviting them to the table.

Finally, things are moving forward on Regina's dead duckie controversy. Last week, the Leader-Post reported that some cute little ducklings were run over ("smooshed", said a witness) by police on Ring Rd. The L-P now reports an RCMP investigation is underway.

In Honour Of The New Stanley Cup Champs

This is how they feed 'em in Pittsburgh. Tastes like hockey to me!

Leader-Post's Arts Coverage -- or not ...

The General Fools (their home page) are in the midst of their first ever improv comedy act festival, bringing in three troupes from outside the city. (Check the prairie dog that's currently on the stands). The Leader-Post (arts section) doesn't have one line about it that I could find in Thursday's arts section. And at the time I look at their arts section on-line ... there's no locally generated copy at all. Nothing on the Extroverts reunion last night, nothing on General Fools, and the story of Jason Plumb's new record release has already been buried. Regina isn't a very interesting city, artistically, to those who work on the arts section of the city's daily newspaper.

That's what happens when your local newspaper isn't local any more. Just ask the residents of Nanton, Alberta. (Toronto Sun Family)

Friday Afternoon Kitty!

Never give up. Never surrender.




Via the miracle of YooToob, and Friend O' Dog Blog Peakay.

Six In The Morning

SWINE FLU ISN'T SUPER SCARY IN SASK Just mildly frightening. The province's chief medical officer discusses the local scene after the World Health Organization called a phase 6 pandemic alert over the H1N1 Influenza A virus. (CBC) By the way, yesterday the WHO called a phase 6 pandemic alert over the H1N1 Influenza A virus. (Globe And Mail)

TILLMAN TRIAL SET The Roughrider GM goes to court next January on a sexual assault charge involving a teenager. Tillman pleaded not guilty. (Leader-Post).

BIG DAY IN IRAN It's election day in Iran and it looks like President Turtleneck, AKA hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is going down. Whose difficult to pronounce name will Stephen Colbert mock now? (Guardian)

SANCTIONS FOR NORTH KOREA The UN talks tough about everybody's favourite rogue state. (New York Times)

PALESTINIAN TEEN HANGED FOR COLLABORATING WITH ISRAEL Awful. (BBC)

STANLEY GETS DECIDED TONIGHT Yep! (Toronto Star) But where am I going to watch the game?

Blog from the Rock

That's me in St John's, Newfoundland. Not a great pic, I know. I've nearly filled a digital camera with craggy beauty but forgot to bring a USB cable and can't share any of it for the time being. I took this with my laptop standing outside a café near where we're staying. It's a residential strip just on the edge of downtown. Got to love the way they paint houses here. Pink, blue, green, yellow, orange. Gray or black occasionally. Everything except beige. Joy!

Anyway, I've only been here a couple days, so maybe I'm making too much out of this, but I'm surprised by how much Regina and St John's have in common. Here's a sampling:

• Both are small cities. Regina hovering around 200,000. Metro St John's at 182,000.
• Both are provincial capitals. (And both have humorously named rivals who jealously covet that honor. The hilarious "Saskatoon" in our case. Here they have... um... "Dildo".)
  
• Both are purportedly experiencing periods of economic prosperity when compared to their own recent histories and to the rest of the country.
• In both I keep running into people who talk about how they're hearing there's a boom on but it's not making their lives any easier.
• Both have urban sprawl problems. (Where in Canada doesn't though?)
• Both have roads so cracked and pitted they've become a kind of comedy.
• Both are pretty isolated geographically which means their arts and culture scenes have a goodly homegrown component.
• The weather here is exactly the same unseasonably cold temperature I left behind in Saskatchewan (although here the humidity is something like 310 percent).
• Both have independent alternative news and culture papers that are put out bi-weekly. (The prairie dog's Newfoundlander doppleganger is called The Scope.)

Seriously, if it weren't for one or two little things (the hills, the rocks, the lush foliage, the salt air, the ocean, the ships, the Screech, the scrunchions, the Danny Williams, the accent) I'd think I'd never left home.

Music discovery since arriving: local gypsy jazz guitarist Duane Andrews. Wow. Just wow.

There They Go Again

Obama wants universal health care in America. (Guardian) Great. Now we get 18 months of douchebag TV pundits insulting the Canadian system on Fox. Wheee.

Sometimes I Get Asked About Bands For Regina

I don't know why people want my opinion on anything, let alone music, but sometimes they do. Well, here's a band I'd like to see play Regina. It's called Garfunkel And Oates. They're really, really sarcastic and mean. And funny and awesome. Here's their website. And here's the video for their song "Sex With Ducks":

Sex with Ducks from Erika Lindhome on Vimeo.

G&O got a lot of attention a while back for their song "Pregnant Women Are Smug", which is reallyreallyreally mean, and very funny too. You can watch the vid for that here.

Go get 'em, Regina show promoters!

From Anger To Action?

For those of you like me who are staring at the U.S. in horror and fascination after a couple recent political shootings--the murder of a Kansas abortion doctor and the killing of a guard at a holocaust museum--here's a relevant article on Salon by Joan Walsh. Walsh explores the connection between the venom of Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and the rest of right-wing television's angry men and the murder of abortion doctors and attacks on holocaust museums.

Here's a longish excerpt:

And there's clearly been an uptick in rhetoric suggesting that white men are having their rights abridged by the Obama administration, especially since his pick of Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court. In a debate with Buchanan a couple of weeks ago, he told me that what was happening to white men was exactly what happened to black men — he didn't give me any examples of lynching — and that it was open season on white men. Wealthy Sen. Lindsay Graham suggested an average white guy like himself wouldn't get a fair shake from Sotomayor, and now even the new face of the GOP, Michael Steele, has said the same thing. If I were a marginal, unemployed, angry, racist white man right now, I'd be hearing a lot of mainstream conservative support for my point of view. Can that help create a climate for more violence? I don't know. I hope not, but I don't know.

Full story here. Good reading if you're interested in the ongoing psychosis of conservative, white, Christian America.

Regina Rental Market Improves! Ever... So... Slightly

The Leader Post is reporting on recently released CMHC numbers that indicate that Regina's April 2009 vacancy rate has shot up to an astonishing 0.7 percent! Granted, that's down from 1.4 per cent in April of last year. But it veritably towers over the 0.5 percent we had in October. That's a 0.2 percent climb in a mere six months. That means we could have as many as FOUR MORE vacant apartments in the city!

Now, during the latest round of condo conversion applications, it has been argued that conversions should be allowed to go forward because Regina's rental market is recovering. That argument has been based on a fall prediction by the CMHC that we'd reach a 1.2 per cent vacancy rate this year.

But, it would seem that if vacancies keep opening up at the rate these most recent numbers indicate, we'll probably fall short of that. In the office pool, the smart money's on a 1 per cent vacancy rate in CMHC's October report.

Regardless, there is no indication that Regina's vacancy rate will in the near future hit the magic 3 percent that city administration considers the minimum for a healthy rental market.

And yet, the condo conversions continue.

Meanwhile, claiming they have nothing to do with affordable housing, city council refuses to stauch the loss of rental units to condo conversion until a moratorium introduced late last year comes into effect.

Maybe they don't or shouldn't have anything to do with affordable housing. But judging by CMHC numbers, city council policy has a great deal to do with the affordability of housing: the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment has risen from $756 in October 2008 to $786 this April.