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Posted by Zoom! on October 8, 2010, at 12:01 pm |
 Jane Scharf Last night’s wacky mayoral debate on social issues started out like a three-ring circus!
In Ottawa, we have 20 candidates running for mayor. Yes, twenty. Jim Watson’s leading the race with about 35%, then Larry O’Brien with maybe 17%, and Clive Doucet and Andy Haydon each have something like 7%. The other 16 candidates share the remaining 34% of the decided vote.
The problem is that none of the debates can accommodate that many candidates. It would be too unwieldy. So the organizers are usually only inviting the top four. The other 16 are understandably unhappy with this arrangement.
Larry O’Brien and Andy Haydon both elected not to attend last night’s debate. I guess they (or their advisors) figured they’d be better off saying nothing about social issues rather than running the very real risk of saying something stupid.
So the #5 and #6 ranked candidates were invited by the organizers to participate last night: Charlie Taylor and Mike Maguire.
The debate – which was very well-attended, incidentally – started off in rather spectacular fashion as Jane Scharf, one of the “bottom 16” candidates, insisted on joining the other four on stage. She refused to leave when asked. The crowd began yelling both pro and anti-Jane stuff, like “Throw her out!” and “Take her purse, she’ll follow!” and “Stand your ground Jane!” (Most comments seemed to be anti-Jane.)
The debate was delayed by half an hour because of all this chaos. And CBC’s Kathleen Petty, who had been billed as the moderator, didn’t (wouldn’t?) moderate. She stayed, but she didn’t moderate. Instead, the executive director of the Somerset West Community Health Centre took over the moderator role.
Jane remained on stage – with a security guard posted by her side – as the debate got underway. She insisted on interjecting her answers to the questions, despite the lack of a microphone and the growing hostility of the crowd. At one point she even went and got a chair and plopped herself down beside Clive Doucet.
Eventually two police officers appeared on stage and escorted Jane Scharf away.
Her tactics may be heavy-handed and disruptive, but you’ve got to hand it to her – she’s getting a lot more name recognition than the other “bottom 16” candidates. She’s not increasing her odds of getting elected by being a pain in the ass, but she never really had a chance anyway.
Personally, I’d be so uncomfortable standing on a stage where I clearly wasn’t welcome while the audience heckled me. I can’t relate on any level to her willingness to put herself in that position.
As for the other candidates, I have to say I was impressed with Charlie Taylor’s stand on various issues, and I liked Mike Maguire. He and I aren’t aligned on social issues, so I could never vote for him, but he seems like a truly likable person. Clive Doucet was in fine form, and his idealism is tempered by his years of experience as a city councilor. Jim Watson? He’s probably our only real chance to defeat Larry O’Brien.
I haven’t decided who to vote for yet.
(I ended up tweeting the debate, by the way. It hadn’t even occurred to me to do that until I got there. Now that I have an iPhone I can do that sort of thing. There were about half a dozen of us tweeting it. If you want to follow me on Twitter, my name is soozoom.)
Posted by Zoom! on October 7, 2010, at 10:51 am |
Yesterday I took three more tests for that government writing job I’ve been trying to qualify for. I had to write a communique, edit the copy on a promotional web page, and prioritize a list of tasks while providing justification for my decisions and outlining next steps.
I need 70% on each of these tests to proceed to the next level. I feel reasonably optimistic that I achieved 70%, but you never know. The government is a different sort of beast. And I had a migraine.
You know what was weird? Writing on paper with a pencil. I tend to write and edit simultaneously, and then when I’m done, I read the whole thing over and make more changes. I move things around a lot. I listen to they rhythm of my words and sentences, and change things accordingly. It’s both a logical and an intuitive process, and it works a whole lot better on a computer than it does on paper.
I wasn’t always this way. When I got my first computer, back in 1988, I found the transition from typewriter to computer strange and difficult. I liked the tangibility of pages. I liked having a first draft, a second draft, and a final draft. I didn’t like the one big long page that the computer seemed to provide. I didn’t like how the first draft morphed into the second, which morphed into the final. I missed paper.
Until yesterday it had been a long time since I’d handwritten anything longer than a grocery list. My hand-writing has not improved with disuse. I kept worrying that I’d lose marks for spelling because even though I was spelling everything correctly, I could see how it might look wrong. When I write longhand I tend to “slur” the last few letters in each word. I tried to write as neatly as I could, but after two and a half hours of writing, my right hand was not cooperating very well.
One more thing: I’m very particular about pens. I find it frustrating to write with a pen I don’t like. And I would never choose to write with a pencil. Pencils are for drawing. I don’t even use a pencil for crossword puzzles or income tax.
But you know what? In spite of all my complaining about the tools, I actually enjoyed writing the tests. I think I’m ready for a job.
Posted by Zoom! on October 6, 2010, at 3:02 pm |
 So what did y’all think of Mayor Larry’s confession that he was a lousy mayor? I thought it was an unusual campaign tactic. Basically he’s saying “You know what, I realize I sucked as a mayor, but I’ve learned from my mistakes, so I’m asking you to give me another chance.”
Part of me wants to commend him for owning up to his lousiness. But then he talks about himself as if he’s two different people. He says the Old Larry was a lousy mayor but the shiny New Larry is a good mayor and we should trust him. To me it’s all the same old Larry. You can’t just blame your mistakes on the person you used to be and pretend it’s not really you.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big believer in second chances. But not when it comes to handing over our city and billions of dollars and all our community services and thousands of innocent civil servants. These are not just toys in Mayor Larry’s sandbox – these are things that actually matter to us. Besides, we only get one chance every four years to throw a lousy mayor out of office, and we’re not going to blow it just because he admits he’s lousy and wants a chance to try to be less lousy.
Incidentally, now that he’s floundering in the polls he’s starting to sound a little desperate. He’s coming up with explanations for his sorry standing, some of which border on the paranoid. He accuses Andy Haydon of being in cahoots with Jim Watson and throwing his hat into the ring just to syphon off some of Larry’s votes. (Which makes about as much sense as Clive Doucet being in cahoots with Larry, and throwing his hat into the ring just to syphon off some of Watson’s votes.)
Also? I think it’s awfully cowardly of him to decline the invitation to the mayoral debate tomorrow night. This debate is about social issues like child care, housing and bus fares, and his refusal to participate speaks volumes. He’s a multi-millionaire who doesn’t live in the real world with the rest of us. Remember, this is the mayor who compared homeless people to pigeons, saying if we stopped feeding them they’d go away.
The debate is called So You Think You Can Mayor, and it’s taking place at 7:30 Thursday evening at the Bronson Centre (211 Bronson Avenue). Kathleen Petty, host of CBC’s Ottawa Morning, will be moderating it. I’m looking forward to it, and I hope Mayor Larry shows up.
Check out Coyote’s posts on the same subject over at the Elgin Street Irregulars. That wily coyote is always a step or two ahead of me!
Posted by Zoom! on October 4, 2010, at 8:43 am |
1. My blog post about the prostitution laws was quoted in the Toronto Star! (Thanks to XUP and Coyote for letting me know.)
2. I got an iPhone 4. This one little machine is everything! It’s like having the internet on IV. I am in awe of it. It’s a camera, a music machine, a flashlight, a computer, a GPS, everything. We were hiking in the Gatineaus on Sunday and I wondered if there were any geocaches nearby. I asked the iPhone, and it directed me to one just 100 meters from where we were standing. You can also download an app that turns your iPhone into a toolkit of five carpentry tools, including a plumb bob and a level. Steve showed me an app yesterday that can listen to any song and tell you what song it is. I’ve barely just scratched the surface of what this one little machine can do. (Oh. The downside is that Rogers owns my soul for the next three years.)
3. We went hiking in the Gatineaus. (But you knew that already.) We did a bit of the Wakefield Artists Tour. We had a cappuccino at an art gallery in Chelsea.
 4. We went to the Bird Show on Saturday and saw thousands of birds. Mostly finches and canaries. I was tempted to buy three little blue parrotlets because they were so sweet, but I didn’t. My master bird plan is still evolving. In the meantime, I have to exercise restraint. (The master plan involves a homemade indoor aviary to house four or five pairs of compatible finches, plus a bird room to house the lovebirds and an eclectus parrot. There might also be some parrotlets down the road. And a single male canary.)
 5. We went on the Run for the Cure on Sunday. GC, Grace and I walked together and it was lovely to be out there with all those thousands of pink people and dogs and balloons, walking together on a fresh October morning. Thanks so much to everybody who sponsored me, and also to Laurie Kingston for organizing our team, No Pink for Profit.
6. GC made the most amazingly delicious apple cake with the apples we picked last weekend.
Posted by Zoom! on September 30, 2010, at 2:22 pm |
I’m listening to an NPR health podcast, and it just mentioned that some lots of Similac baby formula have been recalled because of insects and larvae found in it.
This reminded me of when my son was in the fourth grade at Connaught Public School. He also attended the school’s After-Four program every day.
One evening we were eating dinner and I asked him what he’d learned that day.
“I learned,” he said, “that bugs are 100% pure protein!”
“Oh yeah?” I asked. “How’d you learn that?”
“Well,” he said, “In After-Four we were going to make some muffins but the flour was full of bugs. We were going to throw it out, but then we wouldn’t have had any muffins, and then Mark said bugs are 100% pure protein so we made the muffins anyway.” (Mark was the After Four program’s staffer.)
“Really?” I asked.
“Yup,” he said.
“Did you eat the muffins?”
“Yup.”
“Were they good?”
“Yup, delicious.”
The next day I called the school and spoke with the principal.
“Did you know,” I asked her, “that bugs are 100% pure protein?”
“Excuse me?” she asked.
I told her the story as James had told it to me, and she chuckled in response.
“I’ll check into it,” she assured me, “But I’m positive it didn’t happen. I’m sure there’s been some kind of misunderstanding.”
About an hour later she called me back and she was noticeably upset.
“I checked into it and it’s true. I cannot believe any staff member here would show such poor judgment. Mark said he checked with the Home Ec teacher and she said they were weevils and the kids wouldn’t get sick if they ate them. Mark tried to justify his actions by saying we just have a cultural bias against eating insects in North America. I told him we follow the standards of our own culture here. Frankly, I’m mortified.”
She was way more mortified than me. I was actually pretty easy-going about the whole thing. I just would prefer that my kid not eat infested food.
She continued.
“We haven’t had any reports of any of the After Four children falling ill, but I don’t know if I need to notify their parents as to what took place yesterday. I don’t think there are any health issues. Let me assure you that I am taking this very seriously and it will never happen again. I’m firing Mark.”
I certainly didn’t want to see heads roll over it, especially not Mark’s. He was a nice young man and the kids adored him. My son would never forgive me.
“You can’t fire Mark!” I protested.
“I have no choice,” she said. “I cannot trust his judgment.”
“If you fire Mark,” I pointed out, “You’ll have to fire the Home Ec teacher too. Mark showed good judgment by asking her before using the flour.”
She didn’t want to fire the Home Ec teacher. I didn’t want her to fire Mark. In the end it was decided that nobody would get fired. It was a close call, though, for Mark.
I wonder if anybody over at the Similac baby formula company is going to get fired.
Posted by Zoom! on September 29, 2010, at 1:59 pm |
As soon as I heard that three prostitution-related laws had been struck down in Ontario Superior Court yesterday, I knew the federal Conservatives would appeal. Why? Because that’s what they do. They stick their indignant little noses into anything that offends their ideological non-sensibilities, whether it has anything to do with them or not. As long as they can claim to be anti-immorality and pro- law-and-order, that’s good enough for them. They don’t care about evidence, experts, reality, shades of grey, or good social policy. Stephen Harper’s personal opinion trumps everything.
This government despises anything that suggests harm reduction. They’re against drugs, therefore they’re against harm reduction and health care for addicts. They’re against prostitution, therefore they’re against anything that protects the lives of sex trade workers. So what if people are overdosing in back alleys and hundreds of women have permanently disappeared while working the streets? So what if Robert Pickton raped, murdered and processed the bodies of fifty or more women in his meat rendering plant while nobody investigated the disappearance of all those sex trade workers? They were mostly just some unsavory and disposable combination of poor, addicted, and Aboriginal.
Sex trade workers have been stigmatized and criminalized by those prostitution laws. Instead of being seen as citizens, worthy of equal protection under the law, they were seen as criminals, and forced to ply their trade in the shadows. They had to constantly take excessive and unnecessary risks because of it. And for what? What purpose did these laws serve?
Yet the Conservatives are appalled that the laws have been struck down in Ontario. And they’re going to appeal it.
“My goodness we would have the nation as the pimp and that’s wrong and we can’t afford that,†said Conservative MP Joy Smith.
I’ve given up trying to understand this government through the application of logic, but how does effectively decriminalizing prostitution turn Canada into a pimp??
Posted by Zoom! on September 28, 2010, at 10:16 am |
I hate my cell phone. I hate it so much I don’t even carry it with me. I can’t even remember my own phone number.
I have a pay-as-you-go plan with Virgin Mobile, which costs me the minimum $16 a month even though I only use about 5 minutes in an average month.
To be honest, I’m just not crazy about phones as a means of communication. I much prefer written or face-to-face communications.
I think I need a phone that is much more than a phone. A smart phone. I want it to have phone capabilities, but I want to use it primarily for other things. Like listening to music or podcasts, checking to see when the bus is coming, getting directions, and sending email.
Do you have a smart phone? Would you recommend it? What do you like or dislike about yours? Which apps do you use? Is there anything I should know about plans before I commit? I’m thinking about canceling my land line, and just relying on a smart phone for all my telephone needs, so the costs will remain roughly the same. Good idea?
Posted by Zoom! on September 27, 2010, at 8:53 am |
Remember when I blogged about the girl with no arms who beat me in a hand-writing contest at the Carp Fair, way back when I was in grade 5?
When we were at the West End Studio Tour, we saw a woman with no arms. “Look,” I said, nudging GC, “There’s MB, the girl with no arms, the one who beat me in the hand-writing contest.”
I couldn’t be sure, of course. I hadn’t seen her since I was in the 5th grade and she was in the 3rd. And I couldn’t actually remember what she looked like, other than the stumps. But those stumps sure looked familiar.
As we finished touring that artist’s studio, we stopped to fill our a ballot to win something. GC nudged me, and nodded towards the completed ballots container. There, sitting on top, was her ballot, filled out completely, including her full name. It was definitely MB.
Her handwriting is still better than mine.
Posted by Zoom! on September 26, 2010, at 10:30 am |
 Yesterday morning GC and I went to Alison Gresik’s Creativity Bee at Raw Sugar. It was her birthday and this was how she wanted to celebrate it. She even provided cupcakes. So I brought my laptop and hammered out some ideas for this year’s National Novel-Writing Month, and GC brought his art journal and markers. We also had a long conversation with Alison’s very interesting mom, Brenda.
I still don’t know what my novel will be about this year, but at least the ideas are starting to flow. It’s a start.
After the Creativity Bee, we headed over to Sparks Street for the CBC Open House, which was part of Culture Days. I think CBC was a popular destination: we waited in line for close to an hour before we got in. While we were waiting, a journalism student from Carleton University interviewed us, and the friendly young man behind us, who was six foot seven, told us everything that was happening for miles in all directions.
 The tour was great. CBC’s a pretty jam-packed, hub-of-activity sort of place. It looks like a stressful place to work, from the maze of desk-sized cubicles to the crazy hours and ticking clocks. We got to see a few studios, including the newsroom. Ian Black demonstrated how the weather map works.Newsguy Bob took a picture of GC and me with Evan Solomon of Power and Politics. My only disappointment was I didn’t get to meet Kathleen Petty or see the radio studio.
After CBC, we headed off to Montreal for a party at my Dad and Merle’s place, where we ate and drank and caught up with people’s lives and fed carrots to Lola the Pug and beat a five year old at Simon Says. (It wasn’t easy though – she was very very very good.) Sadie, who is 94 years old now, gave me a great big long lottery ticket with 20 sets of numbers on it. As of October first, I expect to be ridiculously rich.
And then we drove back to Ottawa, played a Bejeweled tournament, and collapsed, exhausted, into bed.
Posted by Zoom! on September 24, 2010, at 11:52 am |
See what some women wear when “it has to be special because it’s the most important day of my life!” I gathered these pictures from various sources around the internet, including Odd Stuff Magazine and Tacky Weddings.
1. For the woman who always dreamed of wearing a peacock costume on her wedding day.
2. For the woman who always dreamed of looking like a horse’s ass on her wedding day.
3. For the woman who always dreamed of looking like a float in a parade on her wedding day.
4. For the woman who always dreamed of looking like a tampon on her wedding day.
5. For the woman who wants every flaw accentuated on her wedding day.
6. For the woman who wants to eschew subtlety on her wedding day.
7. For the woman who’s high-maintenance and isn’t afraid to show it.
8. I actually like this one!
9. And I LOVE this one. I don’t know how it ended up on the Tacky Wedding Blog.
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