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Russell Williams and the Reputation of the Canadian Military
The writers of Criminal Minds, as bizarre as some of their plots may be, could not have dreamed up this story. Our friends from the Monty Python troupe, as fond as they are of cross-dressing officers,...
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Nobel Peace Prize Awarded to Literary Critic
The Associated Press reports that earlier today, the Nobel Committee awarded the 2010 Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo in absentia. The last time this award was bestowed in absentia was 1936 when Hitler...
View ArticleThe Social Significance of a Humungous Public Funeral for a Fallen Toronto...
Toronto has just witnessed the largest police funeral in Canada’s history, with 12,000 in attendance and a 2 1/2 hour procession through the downtown core to mark the death of Sgt. Ryan Russell who was...
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The Anthropocene Age: The Drowned World & J.G. Ballard
According to the BBC news online, we now live in the Anthropocene period, which is a fancy way of saying humans have so altered the planet’s surface that we’ve left traces of ourselves in its permanent...
View ArticleCharles Dickens Admits Fake Orphan Blog
In a startling revelation today, Charles Dickens confessed to maintaining a blog about an orphan popularly known as “Oliver Twist.” Mr. Dickens admitted that there is, in fact, no such person as...
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Why Do Journalists Hate Tom MacMaster?
It’s fascinating to observe what counts as news. Posts on the Gay Girl in Damascus blog counted as news when they were sensational. When they sold papers. Amina’s posts ceased to count as news when...
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Virgin Alerts Infected Customers
To those who insist that there is such a thing as a literal reading of text, I offer a headline posted today by the BBC: Virgin Alerts Infected Customers. When I first read this headline, my...
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Private Label Rights Sludge
Reuters reported last week that Spam is Clogging Amazon’s Kindle Self-Publishing. The problem, it seems, is PLR or Private Label Rights. I don’t understand how PLR works, but I suspect it’s like the...
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Mental Illness Stereotypes, Amy Winehouse, & Anders Behring Breivik
Mad Pride Week finished more than a week ago. I had intended to write a piece on it but couldn’t find a hook. Until yesterday, that is, when two very different stories trended all over the social...
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Doug Ford Discovers Book
Toronto City Councillor, Doug Ford, has found himself in a battle of wits with local area resident, Margaret Atwood, who has mounted considerable opposition to his efforts to close branches of the...
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RIP Steve Jobs
At the news of Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ death, I pulled out my very first Mac and held an interment ceremony. This is one of the original 128k RAM Macs. No hard drive. It boots from a 3.5 inch floppy...
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Don’t worry; it was only a ‘gang-rape’
Yesterday, I tweeted: “BBC reports a woman was ‘gang-raped’ in India. What, pray tell, do the quotation marks mean?” I was responding to a BBC headline concerning a Swedish tourist whose husband was...
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Amazon To Buy Goodreads
It’s the same old capitalist story. A small startup crowd-sources its content. Behemoth gobbles it up with a hefty payout to the owners of the startup … and nothing to the content creators. We saw it...
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Tired of David Gilmour? Read Michael Crummey instead!
Yesterday, David Gilmour got himself caught up in an internet shitstorm. Unlike most of his detractors, I chose to let my opinions ferment overnight. I hope that leads to something more considered than...
View ArticleAuthors Petition for Digital Rights
More than 500 authors from around the globe have signed a petition demanding the creation of an international bill of digital rights. This is a response to the revelations of whistleblower, Edward...
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