…hyper-Evangelicalism is aboot self-gratification. Not believing in God does not make you an Atheist, to be an Atheist you must have a philosophy of believing faith in any God is wrong.
People speak of “not knowing what we’re fighting for” in Afghanistan as if this were a game of Capture The Flag and the objective must be as visable as a flag on a stick on top of a hill. There are people looking into our societies and judging us based on women voting, our churches being separate from government, our multiculturalism and our lawns. And their judgement is we are weak, decadent and against their God. In the same way our society historically turned Native Peoples, Africans and Asians into dehumanized stereotypes so to have we been turned into inhuman beasts.
The Atheistic fantasy of protecting Afghans by removing United Nations authorized and NATO led troops from Afghanistan, then negotiating a settlement with people who see us with the same eyes our ancestors saw Native Peoples and pre-colonial Africans is as foolhardy, naïve and dangerous as the hyper-Evangelical four year hallucination that has been the American and British desire to build democracy in Iraq by using teams of public servants whose childlike innocence has been only slightly less ridiculous than their required credentials for deployment being a shared religious belief that abortion is murder and having all voted Republican.
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this week will create Urban Legends that are going to need to be explained away by our Grandchildren’s Grandchildren to their Grandchildren unless we stop them here and now.
The first one involves a unique Canadian coin and a mistaken addition to an internal report by an American intelligence service. In 2004 the Canadian Mint, one of the most prestigious in the world, released the first coin to have a painted portrait featured on its face. This involved a new and patented technique. Sometime in 2005 a few American Army contractors, working on projects in Canada, made reports to the Defence Security Service, an agency of the Defence Department, claiming the coin — with a highly unusual and distinctive bright red centre, was a tracking device. At least one of the contractors reports made it into a 29-page report which was briefly circulated inside the DSS. Using recently declassified documents the Associated Press wrote a story aboot the coin and how ridiculous the DSS was for believing a Canadian coin could be used to track the whereabouts of Army Contractors.
The problem with the story is that it’s over a year old, this is its third news cycle and the DSS admitted to having made a mistake almost immediately upon the publication of the 29-page report… and then again this past January.
Buried deep in the AP story — which everyone is reprinting or using as their source — was this statement: “The [DSS] never examined the suspicious coins,” spokeswoman Cindy McGovern said. “We know where we made the mistake,” she said. “The information wasn’t properly vetted. While these coins aroused suspicion [with the contractors], there ultimately was nothing there.”
The timeline goes like this… the first reports of a tracking-coin — and there were only a few — surfaced in 2005 and at least once more early in 2006. They were treated like a UFO sighting (ie: as in not important enough to look at), but at least one accidentally made it into a minor internal report, which the DSS quickly retracted and the 2006 DSS Annual Report — released in January, 2007 — again explained the mistake. Using the news stories written aboot the apology in the Annual Report an access to information request was made by reporters and last week, four months after the last apology, the related documentation is released by US and Canada Intelligence Services. The AP then write their story based on these original documents and — taaa daaa — here we are: Crazy Americans Fear Canadian Coin… Part Three.
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#2: A Failing Industry And A Naive Canadian Reporter…
got together this week to announce Canada is a world leader in the heinous crime of movie piracy. Several years ago the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) started telling whomever would listen that Canada is responsible for 80% of the worlds pirated movies. The statistics have been debunked several times by several organizations, but every six months Canada becomes the Kingpin in a crime on par with dealing heroin to strung out D-List actors.
Michael Geist, one of Canada’s most respected technology lawyers, last wrote aboot this on his blog five months ago: “…the International Intellectual Property Alliance, a U.S. lobby group that includes the MPAA, advised the U.S. government in late September that Canadians were the source for 23 percent of camcorded copies of DVDs.
“In fact, AT&T Labs, which conducted the last major public study on movie piracy in 2003, concluded that 77 percent of pirated movies actually originate from industry insiders and advance screener copies provided to movie reviewers.”
I wroteaboot this on my blog waaay back in February of this year. It was a brilliant piece. Basically revenue from theatre ticket sales has been dropping like Nicolas Cage’s career potential, and the MPAA have been trying to deflect criticism of the movie industry’s inept handling of technology issues.
It is understood that Entertainment Reporters are generally at a loss when it comes to business and technology, but the MPAA Urban Legend goes back three or four years and large dailes, like the Globe And Mail where I found this version, have databases of sources which all of their reporters can access. It’s the same with the Coin Story, which has been reported on during at least two previous news cycles over the past eight months. It would have been very easy to do the Coin Story up front and honest, but the people who picked up the AP Story had “Americans Are Dumbasses” headlines they wanted to use so they buried the pedestrian stuff and put the misleading “Dumbass” comments in the top six paragraphs. At best the Coin Story should have been one of those “funny briefs” newspapers run across the top of a page, and the MPAA story should have been an expose on how Hollywood is blaming the loss of their theatre revenue on Canada.
Remember the link to this page for your ancestors convenience.*
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*Parts of this post were scalped from comments I made on Canuck Attitude and Blevkog. And by “parts” I mean aboot 76.5 percent.
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I’m Canadian, it’s what we do. Off the ice.
during the daylight hours. There is no sky, it is an illusion of light refracting across our atmosphere. There is no blue sky. There Is No Blue Sky. THERE IS NO BLUE SKY. Thinking, believing, there is a blue sky is mankinds first religion. Religion is aboot limits, and Man needed limits because Man is constantly afraid so He chose to worship The Sun and The Day because daylight shows us the earth while darkness shows us the universe. So even before the debate started on whether or not we should get out of our tree we’ve been worshipping lies and terrified of Truth. This could explain some of “Trudeaumania” (1969-2000)… and maybe even its recent parody “Trudeausuperfluous” (2007-2007).
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I’m Canadian, it’s what we do. Off the ice.
… we were all going to die tomorrow. I grew up knowing tomorrow was never coming… so, where’s the Atomic Bomb I was promised? Because nobody ever trained me for what forever was going to feel like. For the first eighteen years of my life I was raised to be prepared for the bombs to fall… but the fucking things never came. Another eighteen years later and I’m getting pretty tired of waiting so somebody better start pushing some fucking buttons soon because I am definitely not prepared to wait another eighteen fucking years for there to be no tomorrows.
Todays activists keep moaning aboot how we’ll be held accountable by The Children Of Tomorrow, but no generation ever holds the previous one to account. No one is to blame except those living in today’s bombed out village or industrial wasteland: “I didn’t break it, it was broke when I walked into the room, and I’m not picking it up because I had nothing to do with breaking it.” After all, the survivors must be to blame otherwise why would they be punished for living there in the first place? No one is ever held accountable therefore everyone is both blamed and blameless. There must be consequences, we must start penalizing retroactively. We must start beating the elderly more often and with more gusto. Bats. We should all have bats.
“Bach Piano Concerto No.7 in G minor BW”
…for my friend Sisyphus and her sore brain.
In 1906 A Canadian Inventor Stepped Up To The Mic…
…and became the first person to transmit his voice via electromagnetic waves. On Christmas Eve, 1906, Reginald Fessenden — born near Montreal — made the first radio broadcast in history. Radio operators on ships in the Atlantic and Caribbean became the first people to hear a human voice emitting from equipment specially fitted to receive the broadcast. These radio operators and their Captains heard Fessenden speak for a few moments, then he played a record, and finally played “O Holy Night” on his violin, singing the last verse as he played. Fessenden then asked his listeners to send letters telling him where they were when they heard the broadcast… making him the first in a long line of night-time Radio Disc Jockey’s to wonder aloud “is anyone out there?”
There is a lot of confusion regarding how certain inventions come aboot. The Light Bulb was invented, for example, by James Woodward — a Canadian who, several years later, sold the patent to Thomas Edison. The alkaline and Lithium batteries were also invented by a Canadian, and credit again was given to Edison. It has also been assumed that because Guglielmo Marconi managed to send a few beeps and boops to and from a transmitter that he invented radio. He didn’t. This gets a little more complicated because Marconi did his beep boop thing in Canada, and his experiments were mostly paid for by the Canadian government, while the majority of Fessenden’s work was done privately in America. This has long been a problem with the Canadian Government… we rarely trust our own until they’ve become successful elsewhere, meanwhile any old European Fascist can use their accent to get a taxpayer grant.
Marconi later won, along with Karl Ferdinand, the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics “[for]their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy”. But it was Fessenden, again, who invented wireless telegraphy back in 1900. In fact almost all of Marconi’s work, especially the work which won him a Nobel Prize, was based on Fessenden’s inventions. When he was a child Fessenden had watched Alexander Graham Bell — a fellow Canadian (kind of) — give a demonstration on how to use the telephone. Two decades later, in 1900, near Virginia, Fessenden transmitted the world’s first wireless telephone message using Wireless Telegraphy: “One, two, three, four. Is it snowing where you are Mr. Thiessen? If it is, telegraph back and let me know.”
In the end, though, it was Marconi who got rich by being a better businessman and self-promoter… he was also great friends and a dinner companion with Italian Premier Benito Mussolini, but this seems to get left out of the school textbooks. Ahem. Anyway. Reginald Fessenden went on to improve the Light Bulb, work later credited to Thomas Edison. Fucking Edison. Fessenden won the Scientific American’s Gold Medal in 1929 for the Fathometer, a device which could determine the depth of water under a ship’s hull. Eventually Fessenden held 500 patents, including the invention of the turbo-electric drive for ships, insulating electrical tape and many other underwater wireless communication devices including “the first practical man-made sonar oscillator”, which allows for ship to submarine communications. And what else did Marconi do? Oh yeah, he had some pleasant dinner conversation with Mussolini. Because they were both fascists… and good friends.
Reginald Fessenden, the man who invented three forms of wireless communications, died mostly in obscurity in Bermuda. The Canadian Encyclopedia still does not recognize his work and when American science texts mention his work they usually refer to him as the “American Marconi.” When he died his patents had all been sold by his much richer investors to large American companies, although he had recouped some money through several lengthy lawsuits. Reginald Aubrey Fessenden was born October 6, 1866, in Sherbrooke, Quebec, and died July 22, 1932. According to Wikipedia “three of his most notable achievements include: the first audio transmission by radio (1900), the first two-way transatlantic radio transmission (1906), and the first radio broadcast of entertainment and music (1906).” Those are some spectacular achievements… someone should tell those Nobel people.
Phil The Alien (Comedy — 2004)…
a movie aboot a beaver, an alcoholic shape shifting alien, his band and Jesus.
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My grandfather built dams for forty years… in fact he built most of Canada’s mega-projects between 1960 and 1985. He was the project manager or engineer for projects like Churchill Falls, Rogers Pass (the longest railway tunnel in the western hemisphere) and the Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine (Boucherville) Tunnel. He also consulted on dams and other projects built in Sri Lanka, Nepal and Algeria. On one of his projects a mountain was in his way so he filled it with dynamite and made it disappear into a mushroom cloud (it’s one of my favourite photos). He is the only non-Architect to have his work become a part of the Canadian Centre for Architecture. His daughter, my mother and an Historian, is in the process of having a beaver added to our family crest. All of which is ironic considering what my grandfather did to the beaver which built a dam on the river feeding the lake he had his cottage on. It may have taken two attempts but I’m pretty sure that beaver is still in orbit. Beavers are strange and very resilient, animals. They’re also very large. Surprisingly large. Especially at 2am on a dark street in Ottawa when you’re walking home listening to White Zombie at maximum volume on your Walkman. They’re actually large enough that when you first see one on a dark street in Ottawa you’ll think “Holy shit, look at that massive dog… wait… dogs with a hump that bad in their spine would be incapable of walking around dark streets just west of downtown Ottawa.” Then your next thought would be “Holy fuck… is that a fucking wolverine? Having never seen one outside of a comic book it may very well be a wolverine. Tonight,” you’ll think “may be the night I die of a wolverine attack. How fucked is this?” But then the hairy beast will freeze and lift its huge flat tail and slap it on the asphalt with a sound which will barely register over “More Human Than Human” — which would actually make it very loud — and it will give you a vital clue as to what this weird little beast thing is. “Holy Jeezus Fuck…” you’ll say out loud in shock and disbelief, “that’s a fucking beaver.” At least that’s what I said… after 2am just west of Ottawa’s downtown while walking to my apartment in Hull, Quebec. They say an adult beaver can grow to be four feet long and apparently they can’t see very far. They’re mostly right. It was spring and it had been raining for days and the Ottawa River was running fast and high, which might explain why this massive wannabe jacket was actually waddling in the direction of Ottawa’s Little Italy. But it had caught my scent (or heard Rob Zombie) and was now rearing back on its hind legs and I swear to Christ that big-tooth bastard was up to my chin and pissed off enough that it was chattering those humongous teeth at me with those little front claws clasping and unclasping the air like it was trying to decide whether to leap for my neck or draw a pistol. You haven’t felt fear until you’ve stared into the blank brown eyes of a chattering beaver. Actually at this point I was kind of laughing. Pissed off or not it was just a freaking beaver. So I did my best to herd it back towards the river and away from Ottawa’s Italian community. It took aboot an hour — beaver do not move very fast even when pissed off — but I walked the confused beaver back to the calm water of the Lebreton Flats Canal. Once across the bridge and into Hull I found another confused beaver trying to chew through a chain link fence at the EB Eddy plant. But it was late and I was too tired to play with beaver anymore.
“And who doesn’t love Candy?”… asked the clinically depressed hunter. “My parents.” replied the prostitute. “Phil The Alien” is a perfect example of why the Canadian movie system sucks. Phil The Alien has an excellent cast, first time director Rob Stefaniuk does a great job with his zero budget, and he has written one of the funniest pure-Canadian humour movies ever put on screen. But there are two problems with Phil The Alien… 1) the pre-production budget. Stefaniuk had to take the main role because he couldn’t afford a leading actor. Very few Canadian movies can raise enough money during pre-production to sustain a movie through to the end. So Rob became “Phil” and a stuffed toy became “The Beaver”, Phil’s best friend. The two special effects were not bad in an Apple iMovie kind of way, but the “ray-guns” were toys. Literally. 2) the distribution. English-speaking Canadian movies are not distributed to English-speaking Canadian theatres so much as left at their door where they may be picked up and adopted by a kindhearted manager who may play the movie for a few days but, really, he has so many better paying movies which have all sorts of pre-production money and who can afford to have their characters carrying real guns with real blanks and not cap-guns. If you want to learn more aboot why Canada’s movie industry mostly sucks I wrote all aboot this a while back in: Five Essential Facts AbootCanadian Movies.
Phil The Alien definitely does not suck… basically the movie is a riff on the classic Walter Tevis novel “The Man Who Fell To Earth”. Phil — not his real name — is a shapeshifting alien who can move stuff with his mind and levitate who survives a spaceship crash which kills his father. He’s found by a (roughly) 15-year old kid who offers Phil medicine in the form of whiskey. A bewildered and drunk Phil is then chased out into the wilderness of semi-Northern Ontario by the kids clinically depressed father, and is taken in by a beaver who may or may not be an assassin contracted by a super-secret American agency. Eventually Phil finds God in a jailhouse conversion, sobers up and heads out on the road with his rock band. In between Phil crash landing and his escaping Earth this movie has some of the funniest moments and lines in Canadian cinema and definitely the coolest moment involving a song by Rush. The stunning Nicole DeBoer plays a Quebecois assassin with a Parisian accent while Joe Flaherty — one of the original SCTV group — voices “The Beaver” and the great Graham Greene plays Wolf the bartender. There are a couple of scenes involving the leader of the super-secret American force of baddies that suck pretty hard, but the scene where two puppies get killed with a cheese-grater more than makes up for any minimal suckage. Overall I think the moral is “alcohol is your friend, but never trust a beaver… especially the talking ones carrying sniper rifles”
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Phil The Alien: Canadian Movie
Phil The Alien Trailer (2004)
Directed by Rob Stefaniuk
Starring Rob Stefaniuk (Phil), Nicole DeBoer (Madame Madame)
and Joe Flaherty as “The Beaver”
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0_o
cultural sn:afu 