Partisan rants & city politics
Some of you might enjoy Black Coffee, which TVO's The View From Here will air in three parts beginning November 16th at 10pm:
How a simple bean has evolved from brain tonic to dominant global force is laid bare by Irene Angelico. As in her previous documentary, The Cola Conquest, Angelico laces her three-parter with fascinating trivia and sordid facts on how the beguiling brew had its roots in colonialism and spurred many a revolution. Coffee has an abysmal human rights and ecological record that continues today. The series also explores the mass marketing of the ubiquitous beverage, the fair trade movement, and the emergence of the specialty coffee industry.I'll probably record it for later tag-team viewage if folks are interested.
Sometimes my daily Google News search for "York University" turns up some real gems (whereas the old Laurier search generally turned up football scores and biographical notes from WLU-alum captains of industry).
Back in 1983, Noble co-founded the National Coalition for Universities in the Public Interest, together with Ralph Nader (and Al Meyerhoff), to try "to bring extra-academic pressure to bear upon university administrations who were selling out their colleagues and the public in the pursuit of corporate partnerships." Noble claims his aim has been to “have chronicled and fought against the commercialization and corporatization of higher education.” He also claims he is fighting “commodification” of higher education. We have no idea what “corporatization” and “commodification” are supposed to mean. Like most leftists, the principal methodology of analysis used by Noble is the manufacture of senseless polysyllables [emphasis added].
Should I be ashamed of myself for failing to sympathize with the 600-odd workers at Imperial Tobacco who learned, yesterday, that their plant will close in 2006?
"When somebody running a website has run out of useful things to say, they post a picture of their cat. When they don't feel like writing one thousand words on their blog, there's always the option of posting Fluffy and pretending that she's somehow of interest to anybody. When the boiler of thought is out of steam, out wheezes a kitten..." [more @ Globe and Mail via Torontoist]
I've begun the process of re-discovering the CBC's online content now that the lockout's over. The first gem I've stumbled upon is Radio Canada International (something like our own version of the BBC World Service), which makes reports available online for download or streaming.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it: convince me to not buy this iPod without reference to its too-high price or my fetishistic penchant for obscene, bourgeois consumerist wigetry. I've been doing pretty well on the latter count, and there's nothing (beyond Apple's student discount) I can do about the former. Other than not paying it. But that solution's off limits.
Blogger is neat, but limiting. MoveableType is full-featured, but not as easy to set up on your own. Squarespace, which comes with "modules" like guestbook, photo gallery, and static HTML pages, is new to me, but seems promising.
