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Monday, December 01, 2008

Bad Writing Example #2

People who write for newspapers have a tough job; they have to meet constant pressing deadlines. A lopsided, lackadaisicle blogger like myself can write at his leisure, with pleasure. That said, some of the mistakes and misprints of newpapers are quite humorous, as those who are very familiar with this blog well know. The piece of writing that I'm about to lampoon is a quote, so I can't fault the journalist for it. It's a quote of a television producer, but it includes a typo that renders its horrendousness hyperbolic.


Here it is:

"The feeling is that historical Canadian history isn't what Canadian audiences want. It's important for Canadians to hear our own stories . . . But for now it's never been harder to do historial drama in this country." Kevin DeWalt, producer of "The Englishman's Boy" (The Canadian Press, Metro News, Monday December 3).

First of all, what the hell is "historical history?" Pleonasm anyone? Generally pleonasm is a rhetorical device used for humour, but something tells me he's not trying to be funny. And if that redundancy wasn't enough for you, you have the misspelled adjective "historial" repeated once more in the last sentence of the quote. Phew!

And now for a history of historical history.

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

I Love You

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I've had this poem
running around in my gut
for a while.

time, shortened
by needle pricks, waits
for no one

and this poem was
just not ready.

it's about this great
improbable love
i feel for you.

an apple, skin broken,
flesh popping with juice
as teeth joyfully cringe.

an ancient cedar tree,
stuck out of a
limestone cliff face,
something to hold on
to when I fall.

because we all do.

a vase, filling with water,
just before the flowers
sink.

a crocodile's tolerance
of the bird that cleans its teeth.

it hurts to realize how
much i love you.

like a lost meal it hurts.

but it hurts worse to
imagine life without you.

i would have no teeth
for this apple.

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

News from CUPE 3903 Picket Lines

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CUPE 3903 Strike 2008 Flashpoints.

The media coverage of this strike has been sorely lopsided so far. While the members of the union have taken culture and media production into their own hands, we know that the large audiences are in the hands of the big media corporations. So far, their coverage has been overwhelmingly biased towards the undergraduate student perspective that argues that the union is blockading their education.

On the newsclip that CityTV aired on November 6 on their website, they interviewed three undergraduate students, Union representative Graham Potts, and Alex Bilyck, York Administration’s Public Relations official. They spoke to no union members (or at least, they did not air the members’ viewpoints) whatsoever, aside from Mr. Potts. Of the three undergraduate students interviewed, one supported the strike, and two opposed the strike. The news clip ended with a fourth year business undergraduate lamenting his four year degree possibly lasting slightly more than four years, attempting to leave the audience with an emotionally charged anti-union stance. This attempt seems to have worked, seeing as over fifty percent of people opposed the strike in a three-pronged online poll that measured support, neutrality, and opposition.

In a Toronto Sun article dated November 7th, Alex Bilyck cited the hourly wage of Teaching Assistants as over $60/hr. While those with external/internal funding packages might approach that rate of compensation, this is by no means the norm or even common. To do a good job at teaching, the preparation and marking time often renders the ten hours a week T.A.s are compensated for unrealistic. Overtime payment is available, but it’s littered with a laborious paper trail that renders it prohibitive. According to my contract, I get compensated $29/hr, so the figure he cited is almost twice what I actually make. Furthermore, he said that the 11% wage increase over three years proposed by the union was unrealistic in these difficult economic times. He said that York offered the union 9.25% over three years, but the offer included cuts to benefits and professional development funds that increase the total compensation rate only 2.3%, which is not indexed to the inflation rate of 3.7%. That means in the end that the affected workers will struggle to make ends meet.

His reference to the economic downturn was a purely rhetorical flourish that totally ignores the fact that times of recession are times of boom for universities because people use the time to upgrade their knowledge and skills to be better prepared for subsequent economic upturns. Additionally, Bilyck is not an economist, and he has no expertise when speaking about the effects of the slumping economy on York’s revenues. Furthermore, history has shown us that the knee-jerk reaction of many people to a recession is to stop spending money. If York skimps on our wages, we have less money to spend, and therefore less money to stimulate other sectors of the economy, leading to a further worsening of the depression.

This transferral of blame for the stoppage from the Administration to the Union rings false on two fronts: it is contract faculty and Teaching Assistants who are largely providing the substative intstruction, and the Administration’s unwillingness to negotiate. While tenured professors lecture in halls that hold hundreds of students, substantial chunks of whom are surfing facebook and other unrelated websites, T.A.s and contract faculty deliver instruction in smaller settings, where learning takes place more effectively. This is not to deride the considerable talents of York tenured professors, but facts are facts. Also, the Administration’s offer of binding arbitration “is the University's way of avoiding negotiating with us. Binding arbitration is appropriate when there are one or two sticky issues holding up a settlement NOT when one party has hardly been negotiating at all” (Quoted from an CUPE 3903 email).

Wednesday, November 05, 2008

Way to go Obama!

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Good victory speech. Congratulations on your win! I certainly hope that you can be the change that you hope to be.


Monday, November 03, 2008

Magnetic Resonance Imaging for Artificial Intelligence


Think about it man! Magnetic Resonance Imaging for Artificial Intelligence. I want to get a video feed of that.



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Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Canada and the proverbial head up the ass

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Why is the Canadian public so enamored with mediocrity? After last night’s election results, I have been forced to return to this painfully recurring idea.

First of all, the election produced the lowest turnouts in the history of the country: less than 60% of the eligible voters voted. I guess mediocrity moves in a top-down direction. It spills out from the government and infects the public. If you don’t vote, you don’t deserve to live in a democracy. It’s that simple. So all you non-voters: do the rest of us a favour and move to Zimbabwe. Work is no excuse. There are laws that protect your right to vote. Your employer must give you three consecutive hours when polling stations are open to vote. I’m starting to be attracted to some rather ugly political alternatives because the voting public seems to have its head shoved so far up its ass, it can’t tell whether it’s night or day.

Second of all, how on earth, could you re-elect someone who just frittered away 300 million dollars in difficult economic times to hold an election, the results of which do not substantively change the political situation? Ok, the Bloc lost power in Quebec. The NDP gained seats (a minor victory, but not enough a glimmer of hope to overcome the pessimism ruling my typing fingers right now), and the Conservatives managed to make inroads in Ontario and B.C. and managed to “naturalize” their rule in Canada. Ugh. Gag me with a chainsaw. Seriously, though, the man even broke a parliamentry law he made to call the election too!

Third, it is the very policies that the Conservatives espouse that resulted in the credit crisis. The ideology of greed behind corporate tax cuts is the same ideology of greed that leads people to falsely inflate stock values, which in turn leads to economic crises. They rationalize corporate tax cuts by saying it creates jobs, it stimulates investments. Then why has almost every government that cut corporate taxes incurred a deficit? People lie; history doesn’t. Wake up and smell the history books people! Furthermore, we need more government control of pricing. There are too many people charging far too much for certain goods and services. This would create jobs in the government sector. It would also prevent people from spending too much money on goods they’re being overcharged for, leading to the need to borrow money, which in turns leads to banks lending money they don’t have, another cause of the recent credit crunch.

Lastly, what is the deal with immigrants voting Conservative? Stephen Harper has changed immigration so that it’s more difficult to get in the country than previously. Ask my friend’s husband, who is in Mexico because he can’t get a green card to come to Canada. He’ll tell you all about it. You’re voting and collaborating with a man who didn’t want you here in the first place!

Thursday, September 25, 2008

New Tactics of The Invisible Truth. A Laboratory of Poetry and News.

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So I've been messing around with my blog here, and I've attached an RSS feed, so you can now subscribe to my dazzling posts! I've also arranged to mail ten friends whenever I update my blog, so if any of you mind, then let me know, and I'll take you out of the mix. Information saturation is no joke! I've started embedding links in some of the posts as well, so if you see a word underlined, then that's why!

I've been experimenting a bit with writing poetry about specific trails I follow through the internet, but I've found formatting them a bit of a challenge. Therefore, I haven't posted any of these experiments. If you click the title of this post, it will take you to a site with people who are doing very interesting things with the intersection between the art of film and the art of poetry.

Also, I highly recommend checking out www.blublu.org, and click on the MUTO video link. Absolutely amazing video art. It is one of two videos that really overcame my inherent prejudice against video (even though I occasionally dabble in it too, as you can see). By dabble, I mean use short (less the 30s) clips shot with a mid-range digital camera, edit them together, and add music that I composed to the soundtrack, although one of the other videos in my archive included other artists in the soundtrack.

That's all for now! Until next time my friends!

The Growing Light

Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Why "Greening" is good for the Economy

Dear Lorne Gunter:

At first, let me pre-emptively forgive you for being named Lorne. I have a certain amount of sympathy for anyone who shares a name with Mr. Green, of some eighties wilderness show fame, you know, the show where they did terrible things to animals in order to make them do exciting things for the cameras. See, the show's name is so memorable I've forgotten it.

But really, in your article "Dion Ex Machina," in The National Post you make the translation "God in the machinery" for the literary device deus ex machina. Where'd you get your degree in literature? Phoenix University? I thought so. It's "God out of the machine," you idiot. I know you've been reading wikipedia lots lately, and you seem to have read the first paragraphs in wikipedia's article about neoclassical grievances with the device as a crutch for an intractable plot problem. But you neglected to consider the effectiveness of the device as used in enduring classics of the theatre, such as oh, say, Euripedes' Medea, which has survived, and been studied and loved since 431 B.C.; The Illiad, one of the cornerstones of Western snivelization; and good ole Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera.

I bet you thought you were clever when you applied this literary device to Stephane Dion's plan to reduce our carbon footprint. It's good that you demanded concrete details. It's bad you think "greening" is just going to cost money, and not generate oodles of wealth. Most economists I know predict that the next booming sector of the economy is the green sector, and they seem sure that it will match or surpass the dotcom boom of the late nineties. Moreover, all those coal-producing and gas burning and nuclear generating technologies you say are already entrenched will cost us far more in the long run than switching to green technologies. What was the cost of Hurricane Katrina again? Oh yeah, don't listen to the majority of scientists who link the greenhouse effect with such storms, they're stupid, right? Duh! Get with the program Mr. Gunter. Green technologies generate wealth; they don't just cost money.