Where the Buffalo Days Roam...

"This ancient animal has survived everything nature could throw at it," intones the narrator of The Great Buffalo Saga, the 1985 NFB film below. Saskatchewan has a long history with the bison, a history worth remembering and (mostly) celebrating. From Chiefs Sweet Grass and Big Bear's warnings at the Treaty Six negotiations to the work of Saskatchewan artist Joe Fafard, the bison has been there when we've been at our best. The bison was absolutely essential (pdf) to the Cree, Nakota, Nakawe, Blackfoot and Dene people who were here before Europeans. At various points since Confederation, there has been talk of amalgamating Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba into one super-province called Buffalo.

But y'know what? All that's just too old-fashioned for those trail-blazing hipsters (Leader-Post)who booked MC Hammer as the big headliner at Regina's summer fair. Pat Fiacco, that long-haired hippie of a mayor, agrees, telling CJME "I think the organizer's [sic] are simply looking at continuing to make sure attendance is up and provide a brand that is more relfective [sic] of the current exhibition as to what it was 20 years ago."

Which is interesting, because it was nearly 20 years ago that anyone gave a non-ironic rat's ass about MC Hammer. Meanwhile, the Buffalo, or Bison has only seen its cultural currency rise over the years. First of all, the return of the bison to the Canadian Plains is a great parallel for the resurgence of First Nations cultures in Saskatchewan. Both of them survivors against terrible odds. Both of them representing great hopes for the future of Regina and Saskatchewan. And then, hellz yeah, there's rock & roll.

Righteous Vancouver metal act Bison B.C. (July 15 at the Exchange) are hardly the ones clued in to the awesomeness of the most majestic (and delicious!) of all the beasts. Toronto's rad-gnarly psych-rock combo Quest For Fire's best song is "Bison Eyes". Regina-born Daniel Brodie created the wondrous and evocative cover art seen at left for Roger Dean Young & the Tin Cup's sublime 2007 album Threshold. Australian Sally Seltmann, who co-wrote Feist's big hit "1-2-3-4" records her own tunes as New Buffalo. And let's not forget Neneh Cherry's (way better than "U Can't Touch This") 1988 hit "Buffalo Stance".

Frankly, the problem isn't the name, it's the stewards of the name. Since the organizers of the fair formerly known as Buffalo Days are so eager to relinquish the Bison Power, why not let someone else use it? The Regina Folk Festival has clearly had designs on becoming more of a pop festival for some time, a la Sled Island, so why not a name change? Or how about this: Why not set up a grand celebration of South Saskatchewan First Nations culture in Victoria for, let's say, a week every summer, call that Buffalo Days?

Family Ties

In honour of Taylor Swift's appearance at Craven last night, here's a nod to a Swift that I was a bit of a fan of when I was a kid. (Wikipedia)

Saturday Morning

Oh, bloody heck. A Smurfs movie?

Look, the Smurfs were about my least favourite show as a child. The Smurfs were our punishment viewing for waking up so early that the good shows weren’t on yet. The Smurfs were so hopelessly silly that as words like “retarded” and “lame” have been appropriately purged from my repertoire of acceptable insulting epithets, they have been replaced with the adjective “smurfy”.

Very, very smurfy.



What bugged me most about the Smurfs wasn’t the sub-Hanna-Barbara animation. It wasn’t the bizarre seven-dwarves-on-acid thing where each character was allowed one character trait only. It wasn’t even the vile Smurfette, and the show’s notion that to be a mere female is to be so overwhelmingly different that the girl didn’t even get a character trait. Instead, she got eyelashes and a simper.

(It wasn’t even that episode wherein a purple fly bit a Smurf, turning him into a purple zombie Smurf that marched around saying nothing but “Gnat! Gnat!”, biting other Smurfs and purple-zombifying them. This episode of the usually saccharine show scared me so badly at the age of four that, even right now, I cannot even make myself search for a clip on youtube.)

No, it was the shamefully mean-spirited treatment of the villains that turned me off the little blue weirdos. Bad guys on children’s shows are usually comical and pathetic to the point of earning some sympathy, but Gargamel the wizard and his cat Azrael were subjected to so much mockery, abuse, and schadenfreude that I was positively rooting for him to stomp out Smurf Village once and for all.

Hey, that sounds like a Smurfs movie I’d totally go see.

Friday Afternoon Kitten!

Adorable kitten adorably battles remote-control toy mouse.



Sooooo cute! Squeal!

Six In The Morning

1 MAYBE HE'S JUST A DICK? What is Saskatoon-Humboldt MP Brad Trost thinking? He insults the one million people who participated in Toronto's Pride events, as well as the millions more who support such things, and embarassed all Saskatchewan with narrow-minded, old-fashioned opinions. But the Conservative MP says he stands by his comments to a fundamentalist Christian website. Trost also accused the interviewing journalist (presumably Cassandra Kyle, who wrote a great story but should've reported this bit in the first person) of ambushing him, and then turned off her voice recorder. I hope the StarPhoenixs' publisher is lodging formal complaints with the Conservatives over that nonsense. (StarPhoenix)

2 THE KEY TO SURVIVAL A University of Regina prof just wrote the book on Regina's mean streets. And it comes with directions. (Leader-Post)

3 THE THIN EDGE OF THE ATOMIC WEDGE A retired U of R prof says the proposed Saskatoon reseearch reactor could be used politically to make the case for a bigger, badder model. And the Provincial opposition says it's a problem that the guy helping the government with the pitch is the same guy who chaired the Uranium Development Partnership--which was criticized for not having answers to good questions. Story here. (CBC)

4 ANOTHER $100 MILL DOWN THE CRAPPER, SHRUG Canwest lost more money last quarter--but what's $100,000,000 when your debt is $4 billion? (Globe And Mail)

5 HARPER APOLOGIZES FOR ATTACKING IGGY, AND BY THE WAY, ABOUT THAT WAFER... The PM says he's sorry for criticizing Michael Ignatieff for things the Liberal leader didn't say. Fortuantely nobody cares. On the bright side for the PM, the Catholic archbishop from that funeral tells Harper no problem, don't sweat the communion stuff.

6 SONG OF THE DAY I bought an awesome purple iPod Nano on Monday and I'm listening to it all the time. Currently playing: Lily Allen, of course! Feel free to re-read this post and dedicate this robustly not safe for work (NSFW) song to any newsmakers you think deserve it.

Trost For The Mill

Here's a couple more pieces in the Globe And Mail on the Toronto Pride funding fallout fiasco. First, we've got a Canadian Press article by Jennifer Ditchburn with the director of Montreal's annual pride festival, who says they've actually been funded more reasonably since the Tories took office. The story suggests that Brad Trost's troglodytic ilk are much more isolated in caucus than angry people (like me) think.

Next up, we have this piece that Paul Dechene told me to read, by the Globe's Adam Radwanski. Radwanski's blog lays out how the Conservatives have probably annoyed both social conservative supporters and normal people who aren't crazy (Radwanski calls these "social liberals") and might have been supporters. it's a good read too, and it links to yet more reads.

There you go, that's enough from me for a while.

Everybody (named Murdoch, in this case) Wants To Rule The World

One of my favourite non-Connery James Bond movies (YouTube) is Tomorrow Never Dies (James Bond Wiki). Seems as though Rupert Murdoch is a real-life Elliot Carver (Huffington Post).

Six In The Morning

1 BUT HOW DOES TOONTOWN FEEL ABOUT THIS? Research reactors: the University of Saskatchewan and the provincial government want one. (StarPhoenix). Not sure about this at all. I fully recognize how this proposed reactor will be used politically to advance the case for an expensive, wasteful, unsustainable and evil full-scale reactor. But Premier Brad Wall uttured one sentence of interest: "Governments should be involved in pure research. I think that's one of the ways we can diversify our economy away from relying on commodities." Well, uh... yes.

2 TWO DEGREES OF SEPARATION World leaders announce a limit on how much the climate can be allowed to change (Globe And Mail). Quick, someone notify Saskatchewan's climate change deniers--there's socialism afoot! Oh wait, Kate's got it covered. Phew. (smalldeadanimals)

3 RIOTS, RIOTS EVERYWHERE More unrest in Iran, unhappiness in Urumqi, plus bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan. Fun! (Guardian)

4 HARPER'S HOOLIGANS REVIEW FUNDING The flap over $400K directed at Toronto's Pride Festival keeps on flapping. (Toronto Star) Some jerk-off Tories (like Saskatchewan MP Brad "Most of the caucus is still strongly pro-traditional marriage" Trost) and their supporters remain agitated about the funding. But as a smart guy I know puts it, "you find me another festival in Canada that attracts a million people and doesn't get government funding."

5 NO MO' BUFFALO Regina's exhibition has announced an awkward "over the next year or two" phase-in rebranding of their event, which will be called Queen City Ex down the road (Leader-Post). But why is this even remotely interesting? Because the old name honoured Saskatchewan's rural, agrarian roots while the new moniker speaks to the urban experience--which is how the majority of us now experience life in the province. Saskatchewan has changed.

6 NO SPECIAL DAY FOR SHANNON TWEED Awww. My inner 13-year-old is heartbroken. (CBC)

F**k Off. I'm Full.

Further to Rosie's post below (beat me to it, the bastard) I must add: It was only a tiny little thin one. Wafer thin! (Monty Python, NSFW)

Harper pisses off the Catholic vote

Being an occasional participant in United Church of Canada activities (hauling my five-year-old to Sunday School), I'm not totally up on my Catholic Church dogma. But as a BCer in Toronto points out, Stephen Harper committed sacrilege during the recent funeral for former Governor General Romeo Leblanc. When handed the communion wafer by the priest, he put it in his pocket. (A BCer in Toronto) Which, in Catholic liturgy, is somewhere between a severe no-no and a desecration of the body of Christ. (Harper's people said he consumed it later: videos posted on the net [A BCer in Toronto] are supposed to be 'inconclusive,' but to me it looks as though he didn't consume the wafer).

As I understand it (and Catholics or those who know and mock the Catholic religion, please help me on this), when the presiding priest blesses the communion wafer, it becomes 'the body of Christ.' So, doing anything else but consuming it is sacrilege -- it's as if you're insulting the works, efforts, and words of Jesus Christ, who said at the Last Supper, 'This is my body, it is given for you, do this in remembrance of me." (1 Corinthians, Chapter 11, verses 23-26 via Wikipedia).

Being a member of an evangelical Protestant denomination, Harper could have -- or at least had his protocol people advise him to -- decline the communion wafer. Or he should have consumed it right away, and if anybody questioned him on it, said something to the effect of, 'When in Rome, do as the Romans do.'

The fact that he screwed up -- he looks like he's trying to shake the priest's hand when he goes up for communion -- and that he won't admit it (TorStar) -- going as so far (in my mind) as to 'bear false witness' (Thanks again A BCer in Toronto) says a lot about his character. I said I didn't do it, therefore I didn't do it. All evidence to the contrary doesn't apply.

See, that's the problem. Like most social conservatives, Harper doesn't believe in God: he believes he IS God. Big difference.