The Character of the Election

The CBC says that the election campaign is gonna try to drive home these two messages:

1. The Liberals are crooks
2. The Conservatives are neo-cons

Canadians must decide which they prefer. I suspect that neo-cons are the better boogeymen in the current political climate. Even Ralph Klein admitted that he suspected that the Conservative party would be too right wing for Ontario.

Interesting tidbits from yesterday's Hansard:

Hon. Stephen Harper (Leader of the Opposition, CPC): A party, and I think this is important to repeat when we are talking about the Clarity Act and the rule of law, that has been named in a judicial inquiry, a royal commission, has been found guilty of breaking every conceivable law in the province of Quebec with the help of organized crime cannot lecture the separatists or anyone else about respecting the rule of law.

Later:

Hon. Tony Valeri (Leader of the Government in the House of Commons, Lib.): It is easy for the opposition parties to belittle progress. It is easy to tear down people with half-truths and innuendoes. It is easy to shut down this Parliament and talk of tearing things apart. When they are so desperate to defeat the government, it is easy for the Conservative leader to say nothing when the leader of the Bloc asserts that sovereignists can ignore the Clarity Act. It is easy to climb into bed with the separatists and months later produce the election the Conservatives so desperately want, to play on fear and insecurities, to foster alienation, and to encourage envy and the regional hurts at the expense of national interests.

It is easy, as they have done over and over again, to blame the person who admits the problems and acts to deal with them. Those things are easy, but those things are not leadership. They do not constitute vision.

Then there was this weird question from a former Liberal Cabinet member:

Hon. David Anderson (Victoria, Lib.): We have had a great deal of discussion, quite appropriate discussion, on issues such as accountability and transparency, the possible use of taxpayers' money by political parties, and the actual use in some cases. The Leader of the Opposition failed to mention that the greatest area where we do not have transparency and where we do not have accountability is in the process whereby he became Leader of the Opposition. Nobody knows where the money that was contributed to his leadership campaign came from.

The reason I ask the hon. government House leader this question is that only last Thursday, a week ago today, Mr. Conrad Black, also known as Lord Black of Crossharbour, was indicted by the United States government of diverting some $51.8 million of United States funds in what is called in the United States by the U.S. government, the Canwest fraud scheme. This gentleman, with his two close associates, David Radler and Peter White, has been extremely prominent in the neo-Conservative media and in the neo-Conservative political movement in this country for the last decade and a half.

I think it is important. We are informed by the American government that this money was stolen from Hollinger International shareholders and the Canadian tax authorities. I would like to know from the hon. government House leader whether he is willing, at the request of the Leader of the Opposition, to have an investigation as to whether any of those moneys, which were allegedly stolen from Canadian taxpayers, wound up in the hands of a Canadian political party or in the leadership campaign of any Canadian political party leader?

It's kind of an innuendo question: Stephen Harper doesn't want to disclose who funded his leadership campaign. Could it be... American neo-cons?

How The Mighty have Fallen

Apparently Baron Black wants his Canadian citizenship back. Black relinquished his Canadian citizenship to bypass the Nickle Resolution. This is an interesting quotation:

As things now stand, if Black were convicted and receives a prison sentence, his decision to renounce his citizenship would likely scuttle any chance for him to request a transfer to a Canadian jail. Only Canadian citizens can seek a transfer here from a jail elsewhere.

Well-Defined Constraints

One of my boss's favourite sayings (although he tells me he can't remember the original source), has to do with creativity arising not from total freedom, but from a few well-defined constraints.

I've run into some interestingly creative exercises on some newsgroups and bulletin boards. Here's one. Pick a bunch of superheroes, and take all the individual words of their names. Hawk man super man wonder woman green arrow phantom stranger red tornado fire storm. Jumble the words around and create a new super team. It's a fun exercise, and kinda inspires creativity.

In university, one of the things that we talked about was the idea that theatre is an interpretive art. There is a text (the play), but more interestingly, there are productions of a text. Bertolt Brecht and Andrew Lloyd Weber seem to favour the idea of "pre-canned productions", but in general, each production of a play is a very different re-working of the original text. People get to make choices about how to interpret a part. I think that's neat, and I enjoy comparing and contrasting different productions of the same play. This past summer, I saw the fourth production of Into the Woods that I've seen, and I love thinking through the different choices that were made in each case. And I've seen more productions of the Scottish play than I care to count. Consider two of the filmed versions: Lady Macbeth from the Roman Polanski's and Orson Welles' versions are very, very different.

Given that Hollywood is remaking everything that ever made any money, I've been enjoying the exercise of watching two different versions of the same source. Take The War of the Worlds for example. The other night, I watched the new Tom Cruise version. I'm fascinated that he plays a guy who spends the whole movie running for his life. He doesn't think for a moment that he can fight the aliens, so he just keeps trying to survive and keep his kids alive. That's not the template of the typical Hollywood hero. So yesterday I picked up the 1953 version, to check it out. See how it compares.

A couple of years ago, I did a panel at a con on when (if ever) something stops being the same story. Is Smallville no longer the Superman story because of the way it's been "re-imagined"? SF fans, in particular, seem to have this big thing about fidelity to an original text. Mind you, I suspect I'll shed real tears when someone tries to remake Casablanca -- we all have our sacred cows.

One other interesting example: I recently watched Woody Allen's Melinda and Melinda. This film tells two versions of roughly the same story. Both involve a woman named Melinda trying to get her life back together and find love. One version is told as a comedy and the other is a tragedy. Part of the fun of the film is seeing the same story elements show up in both versions. The struggling actor. The "genie" lamp. The piano player.

Separated at Birth?

( The face of evil )

Wax on. Wax off

Aw. Pat Morita passed away.