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Sunday Morning on CBC Radio, Michael Enright of CBC's This Morning program conducted an interview with Jimmy Carter regarding the softwood lumber dispute between Canada and the USA. He got really snippy quickly, and told Mr Carter to hurry up his answers, and called him a "washed-up peanut farmer from Hicksville". Mr Carter shot back that Enright himself was washed up, as he was once on the radio five days a week, not just on Sundays. Carter also expressed fear that "subsidized Canadian lumber producers will use two-by-fours to pound into submission U.S. border guards."

Of course, the whole thing was a joke, and Mr Carter's part was played by an actor. It was not really very funny. However, this little bit slipped past BOTH of Canada's national newspapers, and they reported it as real front-page news this Monday morning.

Now, THAT'S the mark of a successful April Fool's joke.

I don't seem to be able to load the Globe's article from their website, but I am not sure why.

It seems to have disappeared from their website while I was typing up this comment. Hmmm...

I saw Monkeybone last night and I'm still digesting it. The action sequence towards the end of the movie was some of the funniest bits of movie making in years. Some of the movie, however kind of dragged on and was just inappropiate. The theatre I was in was full of kids who didn't get the sex jokes (That seduction thing with the bed was the funniest thing I've seen in a long time!) and I think they were kinda disturbed by the Downtown stuff - heck, it weirded me out.
After I got back from the theatre, I wanted to see what other people thought so I checked out some other reviews.
Canoe and The Toronto Star hated it. Salon loved it, calling it a classic. The Globe and Mail was somewhere inbetween calling saying: Kids won't know what to make of it, adults will think it's for kids, and critics will eagerly dump on the thing. Of all the reviews I think I agree the most with this one.
I'm still undecided witch my opinion. It's much more than a simple gross out movie and there's some interesting imagry and throughts in the movie (exploring the subconscious) and there were some excellent lines ("Choke my monkey" hehe - still gets me). I really think it's going to take another viewing to get a real handle on this movie.
The Salon review linked above also has a bit on the studios reaction to the movie.

Principal decries portrayal of case against jailed teen

By Estanislao Oziewicz

The principal of a rural Eastern Ontario school says that she is amazed at published portrayals of the case against a 16-year-old boy charged with making death threats to staff and fellow students.

Some media have turned the case into one about freedom of expression rather than the safety of the students, she said.

"It's really sad," said the woman, who has been principal at the school of 500 students for three years.

(The Young Offenders Act prohibits publication of information that would lead to the identification of a young person charged with a crime.)

The boy was charged on Dec. 8 with threatening to blow up the school after writing a story and presenting it to his drama class, and with making specific threats to kill three schoolmates.

He was held in detention until Thursday, when he was released on bail in the care of his parents.

After the boy's release, Toronto lawyer Clayton Ruby agreed to take the case.

In an interview yesterday, he said that it is unconscionable that the boy was detained for a month.

"We too often forget that young people have constitutional rights, too, and we tend to treat them as if we could just lock up them based in part on what they wrote, whereas we wouldn't do that for an adult," he said.

"I really think that if you really believe in the free-expression guarantee, and you tell a child in school to write fiction, you should not be using that in evidence against him. And to lock him up for a month is really quite peculiar."

PEN Canada, which sees the charges as an attack on freedom of expression, has sided with the boy. The Ottawa International Writers Festival is holding a fundraiser for the boy's defence and to discuss associated civil-liberties issues.

[Email courtesy the globeandmail.com Web Centre.

Clayton Ruby is one of the top defense lawyers in Canada, who occcasionally does pro-bono work in cases with a significant "political" component.

The US was in no danger of being defeated by Cananda.

This is another example of why the world hates Americans - they cannot admit when they are 'wrong'. Here is a little news brief Yankee boy: Canada WON the war of 1812.

An exerpt from the top of the link above "'Very little is known about the War of 1812, Eric Nicol wrote nearly 30 years ago, "because the Americans lost it."

My wife has Rogers@Home, too, and the support folks have been quite pleasant to us when something goes wrong. They're not rocket scientists, but they knew what I meant when I reported that I couldn't set a subnet mask or do a route add. Alas, the correction was to reinstall TCP/IP on my wifes's PC, but that wasn't Roger's fault. I particularly like the little diagnostic app they provided, which is a visual ping/traceroute. You don't need to know anything more than to press the button, and it shows you what servers are up/down. And finally, Rogers just showed up in the local paper announcing their refund policy for outages: this follows up on discussions in the Globe and Mail, notably one where Rogers' supplier, Excite@Home Canada Inc. admits "We have dropped the ball on a number of occasions over the last couple of weeks. . . . We have caused some pain to the users of the @Home service -- and that's a bad thing."

I'll tell ya why. When I use Netscape and click on my /. bookmark, it takes me right there. Same with my Freefall bookmark, my User Friendly bookmark, my news bookmark, and even my play bookmark. Direct. No redirects.

But now Micro$oft comes along and says, "Hey, we can make money off this too!" and starts doing redirects with their strong-armed browser market. Load balancing? Hit tracking? Bullshit. Let MY ISP deal with load balancing, or the sites that I'm actually going to (notice none of them are M$). Ditto with hit tracking.

Basically, M$ has no NEED to redirect. They just decided to do it and grab MORE information from those who happen to use IE (not me!!) and yet further bend the Internet public over and have their way with us.

The Globe and Mail also revi ewed this book recently.

Actually it is covered by the C anadian Copyright Act. S ection 31 covers Retransmission. This is half out of the jurisdiction of the CRTC. I say half because they have influence over the Broadcasting Act.

Retransmission of local signals
(2) It is not an infringement of copyright to communicate to the public by telecommunication any literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work if
(a) the communication is a retransmission of a local or distant signal;
(b) the retransmission is lawful under the Broadcasting Act;
(c) the signal is retransmitted simultaneously and in its entirety, except as otherwise required or permitted by or under the laws of Canada; and
(d) in the case of the retransmission of a distant signal, the retransmitter has paid any royalties, and complied with any terms and conditions, fixed under this Act.

The Globe and Mail has a number of articles on iCraveTV that give a better explanation of the court date and give a thorough background on Mr. Craig.

The information I have read is conflicting over whether this is a Canadian company or a company based out of Pittsburgh.

Checking with NSI it looks like their domain is registered in Pittsburgh.

Registrant:
WILLIAM R. CRAIG CONSULTING (ICRAVETV-DOM)
904 Beaver St
SEWICKLEY, PA 15143
US

Domain Name: ICRAVETV.COM

Administrative Contact:
REGISTRAR, DOMAIN (DR13484)
dom@ACEMAIL.COM
416 410 6245X33 (FAX) 416 410 6245
Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
WILLIAM R. CRAIG CONSULTING (WR948-ORG) no.valid.email@WORLDNIC.NET
412 741 8139
Billing Contact:
WILLIAM R. CRAIG CONSULTING (WR948-ORG) no.valid.email@WORLDNIC.NET
412 741 8139

Record last updated on 24-Nov-1999.
Record created on 26-Oct-1999.
Database last updated on 29-Jan-2000
01:24:44 EST.

Domain servers in listed order:

NS1.ACEMAIL.NET 205.207.26.2
NS2.INTERLOG.COM 207.34.202.6

I must say that the fact that a Canadian company is such a leading edge networking power is a great source of pride. But there is an interesting article in the Globe and Mail today and apparently Nortel now drives one-fifth of our stock market. That's big.