There's important news about the forgotten sibling of Alberta's oil and natural gas industries: the Fording Coal Trust, spurred on by a spike in the price of metallurgical-grade coal needed by the world's steelmakers, is reviving its unused Cheviot mine site near Jasper National Park. Environmentalists are up in arms, naturally (when are they not?). The Cheviot site has long been a source of irritation to the greens, who would like the whole Continental Divide made a no-go zone for human beings. Whenever Fording proposes to go ahead with mining at Cheviot, there's a blizzard of legal activity--and that has hitherto always succeeded in delaying extraction until prices dropped and it had to be abandoned.

There are some curious claims, implicit and explicit, among the objections to the mine, which is said to threaten grizzly habitat east of the park. As always, we have the amusing idea put forward that grizzlies, who can run upwards of 30 miles an hour, cannot possibly cross a road through the bush:

The company's current proposal is different than the one that caused considerable controversy and endured rounds of environmental hearings, said Dianne Pachal, Sierra Club of Canada's Alberta wilderness director. In fact, this proposal is worse, she said. [Of course it is. -ed.] "They will mine less coal, but the area they'll disturb will be much larger," she said. The 22-kilometre long road to transport the coal will be an impassable "wall to wildlife" because trucks will use the road every six to 15 minutes, she said.

Not very cricket of us humans to put a Polish corridor in the sovereign Yellowstone-to-Yukon Republic of the Bears! Environmentalists don't trust the Conservative government's stewardship of bear habitat very much, even though Alberta's grizzly population has been increasing steadily since 1989, sometimes with disconcerting effects for human beings. (The grizzly is deemed neither endangered nor threatened in Canada; COSEWIC, the federal authority on biodiversity, lists it as a species of "special concern".) Yet I'm puzzled by this map and text on the official website of the "Y2Y" movement. It appears that bears don't particularly like national and provincial parks, where industrial development is forbidden completely.

Notice that some grizzly bear habitat inside protected areas isn’t as suitable as some places outside protected areas. For example, the area just southwest of Jasper National Park is better grizzly bear habitat than most of the land protected within the national park boundaries. There are two possible explanations for this: the habitat inside the park may have fewer food sources than the habitat to the southwest, or it may have more people, roads and trails, which increases the likelihood that a grizzly bear might get killed.

Of course, the habitat east of Jasper National Park is much worse than either the habitat inside or to the west of the park.

I was writing about hockey in a comment thread at Eric McErlain's site when I realized I was running off at the mouth and should probably bring the whole thing in-house. It also occurred to me that I haven't said anything about the Oilers' stirring, record-setting playoff run--you're all missing a great game here.

These are the nut grafs of my comment ("nut grafs" is not usually found in plural, but two seems like a reasonable number for nuts to come packaged in):

The biggest problem [hockey] faces in marketing itself is not violence (what, there's no "violence" in the NFL?), but the American sports media's need to show American winners and, if possible, only American winners. Ultimately the American public is behind this, or isn't very loud about demanding changes, though I notice plenty of Americans along the border refuse to watch the shallow, self-parodying patriotic pornography that is U.S. network coverage of the Olympics. Anyone who thinks violence is the problem [with hockey] needs to consider the cultural position of soccer and Formula One in American life (and the declining prominence of baseball and basketball as they internationalize). Are these "violent" activities? No, they just suffer the same burden of misconceptions in another form.

In the very long term, by which I mean decades and decades, hockey is likely to be more American-dominated than any other major sport except football (though in the medium term the prospects for U.S. national clubs in international play look bleak). Quite honestly, hockey has spread about as far geographically as it can, and the one hockey-playing country that is the furthest from exploiting its financial and demographic resources [fully] is the U.S. So the outlook for the game, looking very far ahead, is fine. And U.S. media coverage of hockey has improved markedly in just the past ten or twenty years. (I would also make the case that the widespread distaste for fair fisticuffs is a transitory thing. Where are you gonna go to see a couple of big tough guys duke it out--a boxing match?)

Hockey, as I've written before, still bears the marks of its Victorian origins. When Don Cherry says it's "the Canadian way" to fight face-to-face instead of suckerpunching someone, he means it's the way of Canada--and Britain, and the United States--circa 1867. It's the original Canadian way, and it has survived in hockey as in Cherry's wardrobe. Basketball was invented by a Canadian who was very markedly a product of the Victorian Age; football as Americans play it was invented at a Canadian university in Victorian times; but only hockey still carries the faint marks of its original stamp.

Now, you might conclude from this that I think people who want fighting out of hockey are cultural vandals, little better than the Afghan crazies who blew up the Buddhas of Bamiyan--and you'd be right, basically, but since I am nearly alone in this extremist opinion I am obliged to respect those who don't share it. The fact is that American fans are heavily influenced in their perception of hockey's problems by what they hear constantly from hockey-hating friends and neighbours, which is that the "violence" in hockey puts them off. As a practical matter, I would urge you all to consider that this is total bullshit: it is what someone says when he hasn't given the game a fair trial. It's no coincidence that this complaint has the same actual cognitive status as the complaints that soccer is "for sissies" and that Formula One racing is--well, who knows what people say about Formula One racing in the U.S.; most of them haven't heard of it, and frankly that's a sport with very real fan-interest problems. Yet, by some miracle, it's still the second or third most popular spectator sport in the world outside this continent...

Just look at the record with open eyes (I'm indebted to Steve Sailer for persuading me to think seriously about this). Baseball was the most popular sport in the United States until it started attracting large numbers of Latino competitors in the 1960's and 1970's--when football, still mostly a pure American game, surpassed it. By some coincidence. (It continues to lose ground, and, if I'm right, will continue to lose ground as more Japanese players cross over, Europeans in countries like the Netherlands learn the game, and Cuban stars are finally allowed to play in the U.S. without having to build rafts.) Basketball is suffering a crisis of public confidence in the U.S., by some coincidence, as the pro game is invaded by skilled foreigners who can play with anybody. Golf, dominated by Tiger Woods, remains strong with spectators, as men's tennis, which has failed to supply a successor to Pete Sampras, suffers badly. Americans do, however, seem to enjoy women's tennis--which the Williams sisters dominate--and women's soccer--in which Americans are ranked #1 or close to it. Which auto-racing circuit emerged from the last twenty years as America's best-loved by far? By some coincidence it's the one with a gentlemen's agreement to exclude foreign competitors. By some coincidence boxing suffered a sharp decline in fan interest when Americans stopped dominating most of the weight classes.

It's no failing of Americans that they love their own, but it's a distinct failing if that practically excludes the enjoyment of any game that is thoroughly internationalized. Still, in the very long run I do think this is a good dynamic for hockey, in its Darwinian struggle with other sports--partly because the game's international scope is unlikely to grow too much further, and partly because, from the standpoint of fan interest, Canadians may be the next-best thing to Americans. (At least Hollywood and American TV newsrooms seem to think so.) In the year 2060 the great hockey powers will probably be the same countries as now, with perhaps a couple more tacked on. The United States is undeniably one of those powers and, barring catastrophe, will remain one--which puts a pretty firm floor on American presence in and dominance of hockey. I don't see any similar theoretical floor protecting American dominance of basketball and baseball, which are already being challenged.

I am slightly less secure in saying what follows (though not much), but I would also ask you to consider that the self-regulating ethos of Canadian-style hockey, the idea that not all disputes are appropriately settled by reference to the authorities, will protect the place of individualistic Americans and Canadians within the game, and especially the former. When two guys fight on the ice they're saying "We're not going to take our problems to the sheriff--we're going to settle them according to a shared, non-legislated code of fair play." (Sometimes, as with the famous Lights Out brawl at the World Juniors, the message of a fight is "the sheriff is an a-hole; we're taking matters into our own hands.") Why is there so little fighting in the European game? Maybe it's presumptuous to say this, but have you noticed that the Europeans are a little weaker in their grasp of the whole "personal responsibility" thing? That their societies (with exceptions) are organized to minimize the importance and the permissibility of self-defence? That when a European player feels molested on the ice (warning: Don Cherry-style generalization), his instinctive response is to take a dive, appealing to the magistrate with elaborate theatrics?

Found stochastically: an amusing History of Psychology paper by York University's Christopher D. Green entitled "Psychology Strikes Out: Coleman R. Griffith and the Chicago Cubs". Griffith, in 1938, became the first sports psychologist hired by a professional sports club in North America--and, for reasons Green explains, also the last for quite some time. (Bonus link: check out MLB.com's interview with the last living man to pitch against Babe Ruth in the majors.)

I can't be the only one who watched Monk every week for about six months and only then discovered that Ted Levine, who plays the police chief, is the same guy who was Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs. Brr. He's great, but now every time I watch the show I keep expecting him to say "It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again...".

It also took me a while to notice that Sharona (Bitty Schram) is the girl from A League of Their Own who gets told there's no crying in baseball.

I've written in the past about two pleasures which belong so distinctly to my part of the world that I'm always a bit surprised--despite my own fondness for them--at American reader response when I touch on them. There is fresh news about both. The long-awaited first volume of SCTV on DVD finally appears to have a firm release date in early June. The set is going to be expensive, but those of us eager to see the show in its original format without the music bowdlerized will be happy to help subsidize Shout Factory's costs. I'm not going to get too excited until I have it in my hands. At this point I have way too much invested in finally getting to see "Polynesiantown" again.

And at the Brier final in Saskatoon yesterday, Team Alberta played its traditional role of thwarted overdog, handing the Mark Dacey rink Nova Scotia's first national championship in curling since 1951 after winning for three straight years. Through seven ends Alberta's pudgy, cranky Randy Ferbey was up 8-4, and it appeared that Dacey was the one in desperate need of the Heimlich Maneuver. But Dave Nedohin, the curling machine who throws last rocks for Ferbey, began to come apart just as Dacey (who looks like a particularly sorrowful drafting teacher) pulled himself together. Nova Scotia made a draw for a triple in the eighth, forced Alberta to take one in the ninth, and capitalized on a missed Nedohin freeze to ring up three more in the tenth. Final score, 10-9. Alberta had at least three separate chances to stop the textbook comeback, and it's probably been at least three or four years since Nedohin and Ferbey have given up a four-rock lead like that. In other words, it was the curling equivalent of a hobbled Kirk Gibson pounding his walkoff homer in the '88 Series against a godlike Dennis Eckersley. Even without the surrounding drama--Dacey is from Saskatoon and the fans were so hard on Alberta that its lead, Marcel Rocque, challenged one audibly to a fight in the ninth end--it would enter the annals of great Brier finishers, along with Al Hackner's double raise takeout in '85 (I still can't believe he made that shot) and Eugene Hritzuk's last rock dying short of the hog line in '88.

Monday morning's Post column is about the terror bombings in Spain: get thee to a newsstand! (Or, if you insist,

Call it the Dark Side of the Nerd. We don't know for sure yet whether free-spending Belinda Stronach or incumbency-advantaged Stephen Harper is technically out front in the Conservative leadership contest. But after Sunday's debate in Montreal, a visitor from Saturn could have told you which candidate was bringing up the rear. "It's the rabid ferret in the middle, right? The scrappy little bastard is trying to score a knockout. Our Saturnine elections are decided by single combat, but it works just the same way."

In the first Conservative debate two weeks ago, Tony Clement was more cautious. Before the membership-sales cutoff, he still had theoretical hopes of gathering enough new support to compete. But on March 1 the Conservative chefferie became a zero-sum game, and with remorseless logic Mr. Clement tried to transform himself from witty wonk to ruthless assassin. The effect was ... offputting.

Some of the blows were within Queensberry rules. When Ms. Stronach began yawping yet again about the miraculous benefits of Magna's famous worker-ownership scheme, Mr. Clement performed a valuable service, trying to pin her down on Ottawa's hypothetical role in Magna-tizing corporate Canada. As he was not slow in pointing out, she ducked the question. Because of his experience as Ontario minister of health, he is also entitled to drop the odd "I've been there, I've sat in a Cabinet" on his opponents. But to say it roughly 60 times in various ways was grotesque overkill. And when Mr. Harper used his rebuttal time to refer subtly to Mr. Clement's resounding October rejection by Ontario voters, Mr. Clement's facial show of surprise -- Hey ref! Low blow! -- only made him look more desperate and unsavoury.

The New Tony even opened the door for a minor debating coup by Ms. Stronach. Hard to believe, I know. When she was asked about potential ethical questions surrounding a Magna subsidiary located in Barbados, she gave her standard answer: I'm no longer Magna's CEO, I was never an officer of that part of Magna, and anyway, you should ask a company where its jobs are created, not where its legal address is. In rebuttal, Mr. Clement opined sneeringly that the Conservative party leader should be above criticism of the sort Paul Martin is facing for Canada Steamship Lines' offshore dealings. Ms. Stronach wheeled on him with a fervour hitherto undisplayed at the podium. "What are you criticizing [about Magna] specifically?" she demanded, to roars from her supporters.

In reply, Mr. Clement burbled something about Magna's lobbying for reduced steel tariffs (a manufacturer wants cheaper steel, fancy that) while poor little Stelco is having such a rough time. It was a surreal moment -- Tony Clement, lifelong Conservative, playing the protectionism card against the ex-CEO of a company that greeted the Free Trade Agreement with all the warmth you would reserve for your daughter's engagement to a crack dealer.

The pre-debate consensus was that Mr. Clement and Ms. Stronach would tag-team Mr. Harper, but Mr. Harper actually defended Ms. Stronach during that set-to, saying that the candidates should forgo internecine sniping and focus on the Liberal enemy. He said the same thing when Mr. Clement had the hideous tactlessness to mention the mistake committed in January by Mr. Harper's office, which sent out cards congratulating aboriginal Canadians (presumably labelled "Indians" in some database) on India's Republic Day. When Mr. Clement tried to make hay from an honest screwup that even the Toronto Star forgot within a few days, loud boos rose from the audience. And rightly.

For the record, although Ms. Stronach still can't answer questions in French, she is getting better at reading prepared text in the language. Generations of unilingual politicians have promised perennially that they'll brush up their French real soon now; she appears to actually have worked on hers, which might be a first. Still, in front of a Montreal crowd, it was agonizingly apparent that she's trying to win this race on one leg. At one point she had trouble with her translation earpiece (cleverly hidden by that attractive coiffure) and had to guess at the question, saying "I'm having trouble with my hearing." That drew vague noises of disapproval, too, though perhaps the audience was merely cooing in sympathy with a bout of transient deafness. She also continues to struggle with English, calling at one point for free votes in the "House of Parliament" and tripping over some of her pre-fabricated paragraphs.

Mr. Harper kept a low profile throughout, but this debate made clear what was apparent two weeks ago to the attentive observer -- he's the most comfortable of the three candidates in French. Indeed, he hardly spoke English all day. Ms. Stronach's French is nonexistent, and Mr. Clement's is competent, but involves heavy use of stock phrases and lots of clever switches entre des langues -- sometimes in mid-sentence -- when he spies a troublesome word ahead in the verbal pipeline. I don't know why Mr. Harper doesn't get more credit for this. I suppose one must admit the obvious -- just because you can speak French doesn't mean you'll be heard in it. (Mar. 8, 2004)

The Medical Post has an article about Canada's blood supply which demands to be read by Canadians, especially those who still blindly trust physicians to guard both their personal interests and those of the public. Americans may wish to have a look too; in Canada we don't pay money for blood (why, that would be blood money), and any living economist could predict the result in his sleep---

MONT ST. SAUVEUR, QUE. – Canada is fast running out of blood, and a severe shortage--possibly by 2005--will lead to a crisis in surgery cancellations and risk of patients bleeding to death, says a senior hematologist.

But doctors could help stave off the crisis if they make minor changes to the way they practise, said Dr. Jeannie Callum, director of transfusion medicine at the Sunnybrook and Women's College Health Sciences Centre in Toronto. Dr. Callum spoke here last month at an anesthesia meeting sponsored by Sunnybrook.

Simply bringing down the transfusion threshold by two points (20 g/L) would save the equivalent of donations from six blood donor clinics for every 100 patients that go through one intensive care unit, Dr. Jeannie Callum told the meeting.

"A minimal alteration to our blood transfusion threshold would make a huge difference to our blood supply nationally," said Dr. Callum.

She said the recent Transfusion Requirements in Critical Care (TRICC) trial showed a restricted strategy of maintaining hemoglobin between 70 g/L and 90 g/L, rather than striving for liberal levels of 100 g/L to 120 g/L, was actually better for most patients.

The problem is physicians are not following either the recommendations of the TRICC trial or the Canadian guidelines, which both advocate a lower threshold.

"If surgeons, critical care physicians and anesthesiologists followed the restricted strategy instead of the liberal strategy most follow at present, we would save 300 units of blood for every 100 patients going through an ICU," said Dr. Callum, also an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Toronto.

"It means very little to the individual patient but the impact on the blood supply as a whole is huge--about six donor clinics per 100 patients going through every ICU in the country."

Erythropoietin, used to raise patients' hemoglobin levels pre-operatively so they can bleed more before they need a transfusion, is also very expensive but is increasingly becoming a standard of care in the big hospitals, [said Dr. Callum].

"In Toronto, most anemic patients, if they are identified 28 days before surgery, are being offered erythropoietin. This costs $2,000 versus $1,000 per two units of blood. But it is the patient, or the patient's insurer, that bears the cost, rather than the ministry of health," Dr. Callum noted.

[UPDATE, March 19: More here.]

It's starting to look like maybe Jeffrey Simpson will never go back to politics... he's back grinding the axe in Saturday's Globe, arguing that Steve Moore's injuries are the fault of--wait for it--the CBC! Now why didn't I think of that?

[Don] Cherry is an industry, namely himself, and that industry depends, more than anything else, on the platform the country's public broadcaster accords him. Scrupulous about presenting opposing sides of issues, the CBC allows Mr. Cherry to rant and rave about hockey, the national sport, without anyone taking on his antediluvian views. If this were politics, or foreign policy or economics, the CBC would never get away with this kind of programming without creating a storm of protest. ...CBC should either defend its man, as some Canadians do on the grounds of "free speech," put him with someone who can express a different perspective rather than the amiable but complicit straight-man Ron MacLean, or remove Mr. Cherry from the air.

It would be amusing indeed if the CBC were required to be "balanced" in this way. We could give equal time after the second period of every Hockey Night in Canada game to someone who doesn't like hockey and is prepared to wax eloquent on its shortcomings. Similarly, we could require that the time given to the Olympics be matched every two years by a long miniseries about the corruption of the IOC, the bizarre origins of the Games in a quasi-fascist health cult, and the illegal training regimens favoured by certain teams, including, at one time, Canadian sprinters. We could have a rule whereby, when CBC radio plays any piece of music whatsoever, someone be given equal time to explain why it stinks, and that when the CBC promotes Canadian artists, a corresponding airspace be turned over to their specific critics, or simply to someone who wants to complain about the general mediocrity of Canadian art. Every late-night CBC movie could be matched by a savage two-hour dissection of its flaws.

But this all seems backwards. CBC doesn't apply the Fairness Doctrine seriously in the areas where something like it might belong, such as at the news desk: it's not going to adopt it in areas where it self-evidently doesn't (as Simpson sort of admits, undercutting his idea without being convinced not to actually advance it). As far as one can tell, Don Cherry is quite likely to be the only habitual Conservative voter on the entire payroll of the network--maybe that's where we should start?

I wasn't going to respond to Jim Kelley's recent ESPN column, which claims that goonery in hockey is a consequence of the Canadian influence on it. One of my readers responded neatly with two words: "Warren Sapp". Two more might be "Gary Suter"--taking all the incidents and players listed in Kelley's long and disquieting Internet troll, the sum of harm done to the game doesn't come to a tenth of what Suter has to sleep with at night. But, basically, there is live truth in Kelley's accusation: the question is whether it's really an accusation at all, or just a tautology. Property x of hockey is, by definition, likely to have its origins in Canadian practice and culture, because the game belongs to us. To say "Gee, I'd like hockey a lot more if we could just get the Canadianness out of it" would be ridiculous, and quadruply so for a professional NHL writer. I can't really understand exactly what Kelley is suggesting, if not that.

On a new-media note, the stylish Billy Beck is making a go of trying to crucify hockey for not living up to his own expectations of it; it's a fascinating effort, and not entirely invalid. He despises, he says, the lack of honour in hockey. Meanwhile, every other commentator on the subject is pissing and moaning about how an "outdated honour code" was somehow responsible for what Bertuzzi did. Get your stories straight, fellas! And don't just elide the facts that Bertuzzi's action was universally acknowledged within hockey to have been dishonourable, and was met by a punishment of near-unprecedented severity.

It's unusual for Bill to utter something as self-refuting as this:

A lifelong baseball fan (and player for most of my youth) I have no tolerance at for the headhunter on the mound. I wouldn't have tolerated Bob Gibson, but he was a sweetheart by comparison to the culture of hockey.

Presumably he wouldn't have tolerated Sandy Koufax, Walter Johnson, Pedro Martinez, or any other pitcher who succeeded partly by keeping batters in terror of death at the plate. (Koufax was an explicit headhunter on the Gibson model; Johnson dreaded the idea of harming anybody, but everyone was frightened of him anyway.) The set includes, as part of the nature of the pro game, almost all of the great pitchers. I'm a great baseball fan--hockey is the religion I was born with, but baseball is more like a girl I decided to date--and I'm smart enough to realize that headhunting by pitchers is bound by fine rules of honour, not easy for the outsider to comprehend. I know the difference between Marion Fricano and Don Drysdale, which is exactly the sort of difference hockey's detractors aren't trained to recognize on ice. The fact remains that Bob Gibson is in baseball's Hall of Fame in large part because he was effective at threatening violent death to fellow players in a more extreme form than any hockey player. In hockey, we don't honour brutality in quite this way: we may love goons like Tiger Williams, but we don't put up statues of them and celebrate their beauty. So which sport has something to answer for? My opinion is "neither"; but Bill seems to think there is something specially repellent about hockey, and who knows, maybe he's even watched a game or two. I sure as hell know that someone who wrote this--

Hockey is somewhat interesting in that it takes place on ice. This element presents implicit challenges, which, if they were properly met with skills that did not abide constant outright thuggery, could elevate the thing to something admirable... it has never in my life risen anywhere near the potential of its nature.

Just when you think you've beaten an issue to death, you get an e-mail from a former major-junior teammate of Mike Bossy who went on to play in the Eastern League! I guess this counts as more of that "passive reporting". Anyway, here's what ex-pro John Saunders has to say about the Todd Bertuzzi affair.

I still play, still remember what it was like to play when I was a young'un. My first comment is about the freakin' self righteousness of everyone on this thing. "Oh, this is the worst thing ever in hockey... How can I let my kids watch this... These guys are supposed to be role models.... The sport is nothing but a bunch of goons." And my personal favourite: "This never used to happen in hockey."

Well.

First off, it isn't anywhere close to the worst thing we've seen... It's probably not the worst thing we've seen this year. In fact, I'd put Weight-Sedin right up there. As to the "newness" of this type of violence--anyone remember Slapshot? I'm here to tell you that while it was blast to watch, it wasn't far off the truth. I played in the EHL the year after Paul Newman and the Hansens lit that league up. We were a violent bunch. In the space of nine months, I escaped with nothing more serious than a broken jaw, torn knee ligaments, and a shoulder dislocation that still won't allow me to raise my right arm above my head. All for $350 a week. And loving it. Hockey then was the same as it was when we didn't have ESPN and 24-hour sports radio--and the same as it is now. It was and is a violent and entertaining game, the best in the world.

The lead-up: Moore hits Naslund. A marginally dirty shot, depending on your address. Nothing happens. Brad May declares a bounty. Crawford does Crawford. A week later Bob(by) Clarke slashes Kharlamov... er... tells Havlat he's going to eat his lunch. Or was that Hitch? Whatever. While I'm no NFL fan, do you not think that an NFL player or coach talking like that would have dropped about $20K on the spot for those comments? Does the instigator rule help or hurt here? Who knows? I do know this: most guys have no problem getting tossed from one game of an interminable season if they really feel it's necessary. If Brad May really felt strongly about Moore's hit on Naslund, he could have retaliated right away. He knew where to find him.

The suspension. Well, he earned it. I thought it was mildly too harsh--I would have left it about one round of the playoffs, but it isn't far wrong. What bothers me is that those two pussies, Campbell and Bettman, didn't get this right because they are right. They got it right accidentally. They are so afraid of bad press in the U.S. that they decided to make an example... But catering to public opinion just sucks. Who gives a rat's ass if someone on Oprah thinks hockey is violent? It is! We revel in it! As far as I'm concerned, if southern U.S. "fans" don't want to watch those beer-swilling Canucks beat their brains out, who cares? The only U.S. cities that should have teams anyway are in Detroit, Boston, and N.Y. Chicago once upon a time...

I've read a lot of comments about Bertuzzi being suspended until Moore can play again--what you are calling "strict liability". Let's not think that one through too closely, folks. Let's see, hypothetically I'm the GM of division rival Colorado. My fourth-line player, who makes $300K a year or so and really I can replace pretty easily; your top forward, key player. I'm thinking I'd be doing my team a disservice if I didn't buy me a doctor that indicated my guy would be hurt for a year or two. I'd make sure he's well compensated, but what the heck? Of course, there is no way any NHL GM would be that nefarious...

Here's the thing. Guys get suckered every night in the NHL, and every other hockey league. This time, the suckerer was 245 pounds, and the suckeree was badly injured. Because of that set of circumstances, he deserves a serious penalty, and that has happened. When you break a rule, you have to take the unintended consequences with the intended. In criminal law, you commit a crime, you are responsible for the fruits of that crime. Use a gun to rob a store, and if the gun goes off, whether you meant to shoot or not, you're just as guilty. So Bertuzzi will be taking his lumps, as he should.

But I'd love it if everyone would get off their high horses about the serious damage to the game, and to their kids' psyches, and to their respect for Todd Bertuzzi. Hockey fans are already watching the next game; the rest can go back to Regis. I went to the Canucks game last night. At about five minutes of the first, resident evil Brookbank fought foreigner Johnson (he of the Beukeboom). All eighteen thousand people in the building were standing and cheering. Coincidence? I think not.

It sounds like the Globe's Brian Laghi has been talking to the same "sources" who've now discovered my phone number since I broke in at the Post. (Deep Throats and other similarly-disposed creatures should feel free to contact me using the e-mail link at top left. Your anonymity will be guarded ferociously.)

Sources also said the Harper campaign has produced an internal poll of party members that shows 57 per cent would choose the former Canadian Alliance leader.
Supporters of Mr. Harper are quietly predicting their candidate will achieve between 45 per cent and 55 per cent of the vote on the first ballot.
"If [Ms. Stronach] sold 20,000 only, instead of 100,000--which sort of was their goal--then yes, I think a first-ballot victory is certainly very possible," an MP supporting Mr. Harper said.
"In fact, it's probable."

I'm still picking up "Let's not get overconfident" vibes here at the Fortress of Solitude. Harper's internal polls show him holding about half the members in Ontario, which would be quite an organizing coup for someone running against two favourite sons. As the careful filtering of Belinda Stronach's Insta-Conservatives from Quebec revealed this week, he shouldn't have much to worry about from dirty tricks. But the first-ballot victory could still come to grief over eccentric polling times and emerging stop-Harper sentiment. Nobody's hitting the hot tub until March 21.

Drudge, showing uncharacteristic poor judgment, has linked to a Seattle Post-Intelligencer story in which MP Libby Davies expresses the concern that the U.S. Navy cannot be trusted not to carelessly blow up Maine and scatter fallout over New Brunswick. Not kidding here. Davies actually tells the Americans "If something happens in Bangor, we're the ones upwind." So you guys be a little more careful down there! [UPDATE, March 15: I'm told the "Bangor" in question is actually the one in Washington State.]

What angers me about this?--OK, I mean, aside from Davies making Canada look like a few arpents of idiocy by lecturing the U.S. Navy about the potential threats to important people north of the border. What angers me about it is the P-I's failure to provide background. Davies is cited only as "a member of Canada's national parliament." Maybe that's as much information about a foreign country as Americans can stomach in one article!--but to suggest anything like that would get a foreigner in trouble. Davies should be quoted as a member of Canada's miniscule socialist party, the New Democrats, who favour global disarmament. The P-I headline "Missile incident rattles Canada" has about as much connection to reality as the rings of Saturn do to my liver: a more accurate hed would be "Professional socialist yammerers don't like American missiles". Seattle newspaper readers are entitled to better than this folderol.

Last week I wrote on my misgivings about Tony Clement's JumpStart 250 plan to waive taxes on wage-earners in the first $250,000 of their lifetime earnings. Since the Canadian Taxpayers Federation has just released a proposal for Canada Pension Plan reform, I figured I'd feed that through the old Selfish-o-Tron React-o-Matic. Beep ... booop ... looks like I can live with it!

Mark Milke's paper is framed intelligently as a challenge to young and middle-aged taxpayers: Do you want your CPP premiums to stop rocketing upward in exchange for a retirement age that will gradually skid forward from 65 to 69? If your React-o-Matic is calibrated like mine, the answer is obvious. "Gee ... like I was going to be able to retire at 65 anyway? Sign me up."

It is typical of Liberal Canada that this debate is starting so late. We are clinging to the Swedish model of cradle-to-grave social welfare when even the Swedes have begun to say, "Man, who invented this crap?" Anyone studying the pension issue fairly should reach the CTF's conclusions -- that the system is increasingly unfair to later generations, will require ever-greater contributions as people live longer, and is basically unsustainable. This isn't a matter of right-wing predators looking for ways to make old people suffer (though we all know the bastards love it). The Ponzi nature of traditional pensions is recognized as a problem of logic wherever we naked apes have mastered the sibylline sigmas of actuarial science. Even a leftist ought to see the issue clearly enough.

As Mr. Milke observes, countries whose public pensions used to pay out at ages earlier than 65, like Japan and Italy, are tightening them up or leaning that way. New Zealand completed the transition from 60 to 65 three years ago. Britain will soon begin hiking its age-60 retirement for women, and a German government commission has recommended moving from 65 to 67 there. The U.S. moved to 67 beginning in 1983 -- which truly boggles the mind: We're 20 years behind them in this debate, even though Social Security is 30 years older in the U.S. and is much more of a sacred cow politically.

In at least 20 countries, the problem has been addressed by making private personal retirement accounts for taxpayers mandatory, which increases the available yield on the savings and avoids shafting any particular generation. Some of these are post-Communist nations (Poland, Hungary), or politically unstable ones (Argentina, Bolivia), where the private sector is more readily trusted than the state. I've forgotten for the moment why this isn't true here.

I don't want to blow off concerns that might be raised about adding four years to working lives: I do have a brain as well as a React-o-Matic. As a writer, I can imagine my toils breezing past 65 without interruption. They involve nothing more physically rigorous than occasional eyestrain and dangerous palpitations of rage at various politicians. More and more of the economy consists of this sort of sedentary activity, but I don't forget -- to take one example -- that my Baby Boomer father is a heavy-equipment mechanic. I suspect my worried mother would rather kill him than let him rise and shine for work on his 68th birthday.

But, as it happens, the cagey devil has an early retirement all laid out for himself anyhow. He would want his labour union to get credit for helping him save, but he'll also admit that his taxes were far lower than mine when he was my age. The annual yield on his CPP contributions is going to work out to about 5%. Mine will earn less than half that -- around 2.3%. Over 40 years of compound interest, that's a big truckload of money taken from me to underwrite the generational bulge.

The non-anecdotal truth is that if you're not sure what to think of conventionally defined "senior citizens" working into their late 60s, it's getting easier every year to find one and ask him -- even without the impetus of pension reform. According to a Statistics Canada report released a week ago, the number of seniors who held jobs in Canada increased nearly 20% between 1996 and 2001. The overall number of seniors climbed just 11% over those five years. We're living longer than we did when the CPP was invented -- four years longer, on average -- and we're healthier in the meantime. And employers now realize it doesn't necessarily make sense to hustle an old codger out the door clutching a gold watch. From your local fast-food place to the family farm to the multinationals and ministries that keep semi-retired "consultants" on the payroll, we live in a world of better choices and more flexible arrangements for people who don't want to leave behind the social engagement and dignity of a job.

This is the reality: but our public pensions wastefully commemorate a world where work was presumed to wring you dry, and retirement was a fleeting break between turning 65 and cashing out after your three-score-and-ten. That world is long gone -- and refusing to change public policy when the world changes is a sure sign of insanity. (Mar. 5, 2004)

Hockey Week continues here at ColbyCosh.com! But it seems like Todd Bertuzzi's roundhouse to Steve Moore's head has captured the imagination of the North American public, so I'm not going to apologize. Dave Huff, quoted here, wrote again with a rebuttal to my apologia for Bertuzzi (intended to mitigate, I assure you, not exonerate):

I was not calling for Bertuzzi to face a permanent suspension nor was I trying to equate the brawl the other night with what Bertuzzi did. If there was in place a matching rule (for lack of a better term) would Bertuzzi have even tried what he did? Would Crawford have given an order to do it (not saying that he would or anything--wink wink)?

As for the defence that the injury was a little fluky--99 percent of the time a two-handed slash won't do much damage but every once in a fluky while it breaks someone's arm or wrist. That doesn't make it any less egregious, does it? If you choose to perform an action you should be willing to live with all the possible consequences. If those consequences are severe enough this kind of thing would disappear. I do not believe for a second that what Bertuzzi did was a heat-of-the-moment thing. That is why I make the distinction for deliberate intent to injure. Will it stop it altogether? No. Will it greatly reduce it? Yes.

As for the brawl--it's not the last one that I'm concerned about, it's the next one, where Philly's fourth line, loaded with heavyweights drops gloves en masse while the Sens' first (and smallest, most skilled, most expensive, etc.) line is on the ice. Personally, I love a good brawl--so do most of the fans. But a brawl that is revenge for a previous game's incident? No way.

I fully agree that the instigator penalty is a stupid rule--leading to far more chippy stickwork and incidents like this one. I wouldn't have had much problem with it if Bertuzzi had had a straight up, drop-the-gloves fight with the guy. But cheap shots like that just make me want to stop watching the game altogether.

And now my personal media awards for various reactions to the Bertuzzi scandal:

Most Inappropriate Cameo: Tony Twist, currently suing Todd McFarlane for defamation because he borrowed his name for a violent comic-book character (a mob enforcer), turned up on CNN saying that what Bertuzzi did was wrong. "What should have happened, he said, was that, instead of chasing down Moore, one of the Canucks should have laid a sharp slash across the ankle of, say, Colorado star Joe Sakic. This would send the appropriate message that if you mess with our stars, we'll get yours." Gosh, how did McFarlane ever get the idea that this guy was completely nuts?

Swing and a Miss Award: To Jim Coyle, author of the Toronto Star thumbsucker in which the previous quote appeared (and, unless I'm mistaken, former proprietor of Dissecting Leah McLaren). Somehow, Coyle thought that quoting a homicidal idiot would make Bertuzzi look worse, when in fact it strengthens Bertuzzi's case greatly by showing that the Canucks could have taken much worse reprisals. Would Leah Herself have ever made such an obvious logical blunder? Not on the blondest day of her life. [UPDATE, 10:18 am: Weisblott, who specializes in Toronto-media trainspotting, says it's not the same Coyle. Rather spoils this paragraph...]

Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain Award: Another gong for the Toronto Star, whose unsigned editorial attempts to misdirect the reader by noting "Wayne Gretzky called for an automatic game misconduct for fighting ...15 years ago. He was right." Don't look at this sentence too closely, Star readers! Wayne Gretzky renounced this position loudly and frequently after his own career was cut short by wear and tear; and it was notoriously hypocritical for him to have ever taken it, since he was protected during his own best years by the fistic abilities of Dave Semenko. Gretzky now believes that the best way to protect the game is to give big guys latitude to protect its stars. It was never credible for him to say otherwise. A hockey fan would have to be pretty dim not to feel that his intelligence was being insulted by the Star's deliberate obfuscation.

I Went to a Fight and a Hockey Game Broke Out, So I Want My Money Back: A raspberry for the people of Vancouver, who have apparently just discovered that their idol Todd Bertuzzi sometimes loses his cool. The Globe has hilarious quotes from B.C. granola pinheads discovering their anti-corporate consciences ("I realize one fan is just a small part of the large machine that is Orca Bay...") and learning that Bertuzzilla has a dark side ("I cannot be a fan of a team that would have a superstar idiot such as Todd Bertuzzi") when fans in 29 other cities already knew he was all dark side. Suck it up, doob-huffing schmendricks.

All Outrage, All the Time: If USA Today doesn't like hockey, and its sportswriters don't know anything about hockey, you'd think they'd have the common sense to shut up about hockey. You'd be wrong! Ian O'Connor has such a refined understanding of the game that he makes Wayne Gretzky out to be a spokesman for its most violent impulses (huhwha??) and warns that the league may not survive the death of a player from an ill-timed hit (looks like they've forgotten you already, Billy Masterton). The nonsensical shrieking continues unabated under the byline of Christine Brennan, a writer whose work on figure skating I admire greatly but which makes her credentials to discuss this topic possibly somewhat questionable. "Who among us would notice if, this autumn, we found ourselves surveying a sports landscape without major league hockey?" she asks. Gee, I don't know... NHL fans?

Missed Angle Award: To absolutely every couch-coach who was saying how great and vital protective visors obviously were when Don Cherry, Canada's embodiment of evil, spouted off about them last month. Gee, that "pool of blood" that formed underneath Moore and the "deep facial cuts" he suffered when his head hit the ice face-forward couldn't have had anything to do with the visor he was wearing...? I'd be interested to know what Grapes has to say, since he has argued that visors have exactly this effect, but his informed opinion on the subject will have already been pre-empted by a mob of race-baiting phonies who won't consider for one minute that some of Moore's injuries have anything to do with last month's violence-in-hockey obsession. They certainly won't mention that Naslund's cuts from the Moore hit being avenged on Tuesday were caused by a visor. Short memories they have in this newspaper trade, eh?

No Conflict of Interest Here Award: to Brian Murphy of the St. Louis Pioneer Press, who made a beeline for the Minnesota Wild's Willie Mitchell when he needed comment on Bertuzzi's suckerpunch. Mitchell took the strict-liability view of the matter: "If he's going to be out until the start of next season, why should the player who did it have the ability to come back before the player who was hurt?" Murphy didn't mention that Mitchell spent the second round of last year's playoffs fighting a memorable personal duel with Bertuzzi, being manhandled continually while he tried to keep Bert out of the Wild crease. Mitchell is no doubt eager to avoid a reprise, should Minnesota reach the playoffs by some miracle, but why is that news? If anyone but a sportswriter threw a quote like this into a story without the necessary context, ombudsmen would be forming an army against him.

[UPDATE, March 12: A must-read letter from a reader can be found above.]

Too much hockey on CC.com? It only gets worse! The public, apparently, insists that I weigh in on the Tommy Salo trade. At the start of this season I complained that the Oilers kept the wrong guy when they shuffled Jussi Markkanen out the door and kept aging Swedish-national keeper Salo. Salo stunk right out of the gate--he was the worst starter in the conference through the All-Star break--and his #1 status was clearly threatened when Alaskan Ty Conklin did well while Salo was sitting out ten days with a groin injury. Earlier this week the Oilers traded to get Markkanen back from the Rangers, who was outplaying Mike Dunham as the backup in New York. And on Tuesday, hours before the NHL's trading deadline, the Oilers swapped Salo for a U.S. college player. The whole crazy sequence of events might lead an unsuspecting observer to think I'd been hired quietly as the assistant GM. Maybe the cheque's in the mail...

Real Oilers GM Kevin Lowe tried manfully to put the best face on the trade today, saying (I'm paraphrasing), "Tommy was here for five years; this wasn't his best season; with all due respect, we've never got past the first round of the playoffs with him in the net; we wish him the best." The Salo trade should be a moment of vindication for me, but the Oilers may not be able to climb out of the hole Tommy's half-year funk left them in. (He was already permitted to suck for about half of last year, and he went in the tank in the playoffs.) Unquestionably Lowe would have gotten more for Salo if he'd moved him while they still had Markkanen the first time; selling him into the crowded market of Deadline Day made him worth next to nil, and Colorado obtained him strictly to carry water for David Aebischer. (But will he stay in town and start for the Avs Wednesday night against Edmonton?)

In short, the Oilers did the right thing, but only after they became the last people to realize that Salo was a has-been. They must have known the details of the "difficult personal time for Tommy" that CHED's Bryan Hall referred to cryptically tonight in discussing the trade. (What a classic bit of sportswriter repugnance. Don't you love how these guys find a way to let us know there's something they knew all along that they couldn't tell us and can't reveal the details of even now. A beautiful little fuck-you to the civilians.) But then again, Salo may have been damaged goods for the same mysterious reason. The good news is that the Oilers get Salo's $4M salary off the payroll, and their goaltending situation becomes clear: Markkanen and Conklin, who are both better than Salo now, will split the duties, with the former probably getting a bit more work. Markkanen has come through magnificently at nailing home the point I've been making for nine months, although his play with the Rangers proved it well enough. He started his first game as a reacquired Oiler on Thursday against St. Louis; he was the second star (27 saves) in a 1-1 tie. Last night he played against Calgary: another 1-1 tie (30 saves), another second star. All he needed all along was a little TLC.

Now I'm getting e-mail that basically suggests that Bertuzzi should get the death penalty for jumping Steve Moore. Dave Huff writes:

When will the NHL get up enough nerve to introduce some kind of match[ing] suspension for deliberate attempts to injure? How about Bertuzzi getting a one year suspension that starts once Moore returns? If Moore is out for a year--Bertuzzi is gone for two. If his career is over--so is Bertuzzi's. Sounds harsh, but if it was implemented by the league tomorrow you would see an immediate end to this kind of cheap crap. The two-handed slash would disappear overnight, as would spearing, etc. Let the league warn a team such as Vancouver--or Philly and Ottawa in their coming rematch--that they will deal with intentional goon work with multi-million dollar fines (one year suspensions without pay, etc.) and the headhunting would be gone.

First of all, this conflates harmless and entertaining brawling, Flyers-Sens fashion, with offences like Bertuzzi's that are of an entirely different order of badness. This is exactly the kind of knee-jerk confusion that leads to inappropriate rulemaking. One lesson to take away from this incident: if Bertuzzi had been allowed to avenge Moore's run at Naslund immediately with his fists without drawing an instigator penalty, he wouldn't have had to lie in wait for a lopsided game before striking back. If the league doesn't look at its own secondary culpability here, and if fans don't think more clearly, we'll go on piling bad legislative innovation upon bad legislative innovation until hockey is as poorly run as the Canadian government.

Second: there's no sense ending Bertuzzi's career over an injury he unquestionably inflicted but that was also a little fluky. Bert is one of the players we're going to be telling our grandkids we saw, and he didn't intend to break anyone's neck. There are many worse things he might have done--what McSorley did to Brashear was worse, of its own accord, though the injury consequences, by pure luck, weren't as bad. It's simply not true that implementing strict liability of this sort is going to end hot-headed, foolish actions, any more than the hanging of pig thieves in 18th-century England ended pig theft. Bert didn't possess the mens rea to be convicted of career murder.

Third: I am mystified that my post about how much Bertuzzi's ambush is going to cost him, and the Canucks, should provoke anyone to complain that the monetary cost of goon work is not high enough. Just to reiterate, Bertuzzi is likely to be $7M out of pocket and the Canucks are facing a one-time financial liability on the same order of magnitude as their entire team payroll. Also, the league has already established a precedent (McSorley) for one-year unpaid suspensions. These facts didn't save Steve Moore's vertebrae. There's no catcher in the rye here, folks. Hockey players are going to suffer injuries like this unless we start castrating them all on draft day and making them wear neodymium magnets to repel body checks.

Fourth: is it morally proper to impose an extreme penalty on Bertuzzi for an action he might have been directly ordered to take (in order to protect a teammate)? The evidence suggests he was, and that's something we might want to think about here. I realize it's redolent of "I vas only folloving orders", but nobody is proposing any career sanction against Crawford.

And the Canucks may need every penny: Moore isn't just a hockey player, he's a rookie chosen in the second round of the draft who played collegiate hockey at Harvard. Any of you personal-injury lawyers out there afraid to take that lawsuit? If Moore's career in hockey is over, I'd guess he has an excellent pretext for a claim of ten million dollars or more in lost income against Bertuzzi and Vancouver. And hey--they'd be getting off easy. The real nightmare is that this Harvard-educated young man will come away from rehab totally disabled, and will be able to claim lost post-hockey income too. If things pan out that way, $10M will be chump change. All things considered, Bert's ambush could be very expensive for certain unfortunate insurance companies. I hope the Canucks still think they're getting good value for money with the universally-hated Marc Crawford behind the bench; I'll eat Rosie O'Donnell's thong if that sadist didn't order Bertuzzi to jump Moore.

Sports news: the Brier (the hallowed symbol of supermacy in Canadian curling) is on and, once again, Alberta is annihilating the field. Ho-hum. Elsewhere, star Canucks galoot Todd Bertuzzi basically killed a guy tonight--I warned you about him during last year's playoffs:

Did they find this guy in the jungle? I've never, never seen such a physically dominant power forward. If you're not a hockey fan, think of Bertuzzi as being the NHL's Shaq: a horrifying, unstoppable man-mountain. The effect isn't so much geophysical, as in Shaq's case, as it is psychic: Bertuzzi's only 6'3", after all--there are guys who'll have three inches on him nowadays. But there are basketball players taller than Shaq, too, and they just don't seem to have the volcanic implications he does. Same with Bertuzzi. When he collides with anything, the "anything" always gives way. If he sets out to injure somebody, you get the sense it's a done deal.

Bert was immediately suspended without pay by the league Monday night, which I've never even heard of before. Of course, I've only been watching NHL hockey for a quarter-frigging-century or so. Dino Ciccarelli was actually thrown in actual, physical jail for behaviour that didn't get him suspended immediately without pay. So I guess it was pretty bad. You never like to see the phrase "motionless in... a pool of blood" in a news story. It's not a positive indicator.

My column today is a

Until just a few years ago, intellectual property wasn't an area of law and morals that ordinary people had to wrestle with much. You might bump into the odd "HOME TAPING IS KILLING MUSIC" plea on a record sleeve -- funny, it never did manage to kill music, no matter how hard generations of teenagers tried -- or, if you were a college student, you might see a poster in the library warning of death and dismemberment if you abused your photocopying privileges. Creators' and publishers' rights were something you might think about once every five years, or never.

It almost seems like a lost Eden. Computers and the Internet have changed the nature of books, music and movies for the end-user: We now see them for what they "really" are -- chunks of info-bits which can be represented by digital symbols. You can use the same symbols for sounds, images and texts; and if you copy the symbols, you have a copy of the thing. This is a revolution in human consciousness -- much like the invention of movable type, and indeed almost an adaptation of it, but on a geometrically explosive scale. When you consider how Gutenberg's discovery scrambled religion, art, philosophy and politics, ignited wars of unprecedented scale and tilted the playing field of civilizations ... it makes one a little frightened to be alive now.

So here we are, trying to make sense of the first skirmishes. The Canadian Recording Industry Association filed a "John Doe" lawsuit in Federal Court on Feb. 10 against everyone in Canada -- literally everyone -- who is infringing on record-company music copyrights by sharing sound files over the Internet. The number of hypothetical defendants is probably well over a million, but CRIA is following the example of its American analogue, asking the court to make five Internet providers disclose the identities of 29 file-sharers now known only to the record companies by their numerical Internet addresses and aliases.

It's a bizarre spectacle: a pack of multinational companies trying to sue Canadians they know only as "Meghan32" or "DaddyCoolLeafsFan" or "Geekboy" (to take three real examples). The motion has been adjourned until March 12, at which time Justice Konrad von Finckenstein, the former Competition Bureau commissioner, may decide whether the requested disclosure is reasonable. Even the Internet providers don't agree on whether it is. Shaw is contesting it aggressively, arguing that it would be unreasonable for a court to issue what amounts to a search warrant in a civil proceeding. But Videotron says it will be "delighted" to comply -- subscriber privacy be damned.

Justice von Finckenstein will not be the last powerful person asked to invent a new social norm for the digital world out of whole cloth. The nature of the Net, for Canadians, hangs in the balance. You can grant, though not everyone does, that it is wrong to distribute somebody else's copyrighted material for free. But look at the questions which throng around you as soon as you advance this modest postulate. Is making sound files available for sharing on your hard drive an active offence against copyright? -- is it "distribution," or more like leaving a door open? Should Internet service providers be allowed, or even permitted, to disclose user identities at the demand of those who merely suspect their legal rights have been prejudiced? When ISPs begin co-operating with certain corporations to monitor your online activity, where will it stop?

And what about the levy we Canadians already pay on blank media to cover the costs of home copying? It is an undecided legal question whether we are not, in fact, perfectly entitled to share media files. Never mind whether ISPs are capable of accurately disclosing the identities behind dynamic Internet Protocol addresses, or how CRIA might show that the owners of the Internet accounts in question actually did the downloading themselves.

Suits against individual file-sharers seem to have had a psychologically impeding effect on file-sharing in the U.S. They have also created widespread, open contempt for the plaintiffs. Intellectual property has always been regarded as a form of temporary monopoly, and these companies, having found that technology has made that monopoly harder to preserve, are trying to defend their profit margins by questionable tactics. (Since when is one allowed to sue "everybody who has committed tort X" all at once?) These tactics threaten the anarchic, bottom-up nature of the Internet, whose net benefits to everyone are vast and undisputable. Hey -- even spam-clogged e-mail is better than no e-mail.

One supposes the drama must play out, and let us pray for Geekboy in the meantime. There is no way to force the record companies to accept the message millions are sending with their behaviour -- namely, that consumers who can burn CDs for under a dollar are unlikely to pay $15 for one. CRIA is only trying to forestall the doom of members too sclerotic to find new ways to profit from music, as individual artists and small companies are already doing. Thus does the Internet humble the great and kill the immortal; and its work (said the media employee nervously) is very far from being done. (Mar. 1, 2003)

I bought the first season of Curb Your Enthusiasm on Saturday. Watched six or seven of the episodes and, for the first time, the original one-hour HBO special from which the series was spun off. (I also took a flyer on The Singing Detective, but I wanted to get to CYE first.) I find Larry David really interesting to look at. Is that weird? He's got a distinctive style of dress, casual yet somehow vaguely clerical and intimidating. I guess it's how you would dress if you liked muted, comfortable clothing and you came into $50-$100 million, or whatever, from a hit network series. He's frightfully tall, and there's something oddly aristocratic about his bearing. I suspect he has Cohen genes or some similarly distinguished haplotype coming out his ears.

Like Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm seems somehow savage--an ironized, almost nihilistic chronicle of American barbarism and monomania, having about as much in common with other sitcoms as Kafka's "Hunger Artist" does with the Hardy Boys. But David's artistic choice to put himself in the show steers it toward less purely satirical territory. Seinfeld was about contemptible people--whom we liked, if we liked them, out of familiarity and because we were shown the underlying narrative logic of their outrageous actions--interacting with other contemptible people. As the show ran onward you got a more marked sense of the characters as marionettes. David's finale came as close to destroying them physically as network TV would allow. I'm confident he would have had them shot, on-screen, if he could have.

In the world of Curb Your Enthusiasm you can't shake the suspicion that perhaps Larry David, whatever his self-deprecating protestations, regards "Larry David" as the hero of the show, a quasi-intellectual, creative-professional Christ figure adrift amidst a sea of grasping, pleading, whining nutballs. And, in fact, if you're inclined to view the show that way, the logic holds up remarkably well. Normally "Larry" is either being terrorized quite randomly, thanks to some farcical explosion of circumstances, or is getting into trouble by pursuing some item of his private and arbitrary social credo too far. I don't know if the term "comedy of manners" has ever been applied here, but that's what Curb Your Enthusiasm is; a humorous meditation about the unwritten codes governing the roadway, the dinner party, the driving range, the memorial service. I'd hate to come off as one of those prats who tries to co-opt everything for conservatism, and David's electoral politics seem to lie left of the Clintonian, but the unstated theme of every CYE episode is the longing for a world--by implication, a lost world--of clear social expectations. Perhaps without knowing it, David has crammed some of the concerns of the 19th-century novel into the small screen.

It's a quiet Sunday, so I rapped out a long piece on my study of the last two years' NHL playoffs (previously mentioned below). It's strictly for intense fans of number-crunching or hockey or both, which is why I tucked it away here. Plus, I really don't want anybody reading it if I might be placing a playoff bet with them.

Sheila Copps has lost the Hamilton East Liberal nomination to Tony Valeri. Everyone is being super careful not to "count her out"--that's the accepted phrasing in situations like this, isn't it? By God, don't count Sheila Copps out.

Well, pardon me for adding insult to injury here, but why the hell shouldn't we count her out? In her latter years as a Minister of the Crown she was associated with bright ideas like, er, that huge federal sponsorship and advertising program that was designed to keep Quebec in Confederation--you remember the one. She's blown up so many bridges in the Liberal Party, she practically qualifies for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. She was supposed to be personally indestructible in Hamilton, but she couldn't produce enough warm bodies to defeat a baked ham tonight, despite her long years as a human gravy teat for artistes and minorities. She pursued her quixotic leadership campaign to what can with unusual accuracy be called "the bitter end", refusing to throw her support behind any of the men who could credibly succeed Jean Chretien. She had been threatening, more in deed than word, to cross over to the New Democrats if she didn't get the nomination; if she is allowed to do so, it will make a mockery of her weepy last-minute reconciliation to the bosom of Liberaldom, and invite a personal kamikaze attack by Paul Martin's stormtroopers in a labour-heavy riding the NDP's probably glad Valeri won. (Of course, perhaps you think vindictiveness and rage are qualities completely alien to Mr. Martin. If so, perhaps your information is better than mine. And everyone else's.)

And as an independent candidate, she would face basically the same task she has now failed at, with the same problems, plus an added stigma of treason and an added burden of organizational solitude. She lost a straight fight in a place where everything but the identity of the Liberal leader was working in her favour. Granted, this did mean that the odds were against her, and "straight" Liberal fights bear startling resemblances to corkscrews--but the spell has nonetheless been broken. When a local star stops being a star, what's left? Don't all say "Her remarkable charisma" at once. Being a poor loser doesn't win you many friends in politics, and she's shaping up to be one of the worst on record. No, we probably haven't seen the last of Sheila Copps, but as a mayor of Hamilton or executive director of NAC-SOW, she won't exactly be on TV every single night either.

Lake Buena Vista, Fla.--After former major leaguer Andy Van Slyke said that 45-year-old Brave Julio Franco must be on steroids, Franco said the only thing he's on is the power of devout faith.

"Julio Franco is 46 years old [sic]--I've got to believe he's on it," Van Slyke told host Rick Barry on KNBR, the San Francisco Giants' flagship radio station, on Wednesday.

Told of those comments Thursday, Franco smiled and said, "Tell Andy Van Slyke he's right--I'm on the best juice there is. I'm juiced up every day, and the name of my juice is Jesus.

"I'm on His power, His wisdom, His understanding. Andy Van Slyke is right. But the thing he didn't mention was what kind of steroids I'm on. Next time you talk to him, tell him the steroid I'm on is Jesus of Nazareth."

Of course, as you may have read, Jeff Kent already tried to implicate the Jesus of Baseball in the steroid scandal the other day.

"Babe Ruth didn't do steroids," Kent told the Houston Chronicle. "How do you know? People are saying Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth... how do you know those guys didn't do steroids? So all of a sudden you've got guys doing steroids now in the 20th century, 21st century? Come on."

It's a thrilling idea--a desperate Babe, his power slowly running down in the '30s, travelling in haste to Switzerland in the off-season to consult secretly with Leopold S. Ruzicka. "C'mon, Doc! You've got to have something for me!"

A lot of people have laughed at Kent, and rightly so, but few have pointed out that there are anecdotal reasons to think that the Babe may have tampered with his lumber, rather than his hormones...

Former Edmonton alderman, Toronto council candidate, and world-touring environmentalist Richard "Tooker" Gomberg has recycled himself at the age of 48. He will be remembered as the first, and to date only, member of city council to have installed an active compost heap in his office.

In today's Post I've written about reforming the Canada Pension Plan by increasing the age of eligibility: our life expectancy has gone up four years since the CPP was introduced, so maybe adding four years to the age-65 cutoff isn't such a bad idea. But you can

Americans might also like to scope the controversial comments made last week by Federal Reserve chairman and earthbound deity Alan Greenspan. "Under current law, and even with the so-called normal retirement age for Social Security slated to move up to 67 over the next two decades, the ratio of the number of years that the typical worker will spend in retirement to the number of years he or she works will rise in the long term. A critical step forward would be to adjust the system so that this ratio stabilizes..."

When you've ploughed through all that you can come back and read my Post column from last Friday, which talked about the spread of Joe Trippi's ideas to Canadian politics. Here 'tis:

Oh, to have been invited to a Belinda.ca house party! Struggling manfully to accept my C-list status, I learn from the Thursday morning Post that 400 Stronach supporters met the night before in 32 Canadian homes to wolf down Stilton and Merlot and to be connected by telephone to their candidate. Ms. Stronach was installed near a speakerphone and fielded questions from her supporters: One trusts she demonstrated more convincingly than she did at the weekend debate that she was, indeed, live and not Memorex. One also trusts that the partygoers had the courtesy not to ask anything in French.

But what's this quote at the end of the piece? "Ms. Stronach ... credited the 'young people' in her campaign with coming up with the idea for the house party."

"Young people" could mean a lot of things, but the correct translation here is almost certainly "extravagantly-paid Conservative spin doctors." The simulcast Belinda-bash is a transparent effort to reprise the house parties pioneered by the Democratic presidential campaign of former Vermont governor Howard Dean. Since Gov. Dean was shut out humiliatingly in the actual primaries, it's easy to see why Ms. Stronach declined to acknowledge the real genesis of the idea. Though it's always possible she just didn't know.

This is an interesting moment in Canadian politics, and may be significant for the wider democratic world. Gov. Dean's campaign manager was Joe Trippi, a guy from Los Angeles who caught the political bug as a teenager watching Robert F. Kennedy at work in 1968. Mr. Trippi came on board the stagnant Dean campaign and used the power of networking -- specifically, the untapped power of the Internet -- to turn it into the most powerful fundraising engine in Democratic politics. In a matter of weeks the unknown New Englander from every West Wing fan's wet dreams was the undisputed frontrunner. A few verbal gaffes and freaky war whoops later, he met a fate almost as unkind as RFK's.

Now there is a hot theoretical debate over whether Mr. Trippi (who was fired when things turned sour) was really a genius let down by his candidate, or whether his new campaigning techniques were a harmful distraction. The Trippi approach was to position Dean as the Democrat who "listens": the governor even changed his platform several times in mid-campaign according to the feedback from his Web portal. Mr. Trippi proved that enough people now trust the Net with their credit-card information for a candidate to be able to raise unfathomable millions online. He also tried to prove that the Net could be used as an unstoppable organizing tool -- but here the results were questionable. The throngs of motivated and connected Dean supporters who were supposed to blitz the Iowa caucuses and stake their man to an early lead never showed up.

Belinda Stronach is also very visibly trying to be the candidate who "listens." But -- irony alert! -- the Deaniac techniques she is borrowing only show how heavily she is mortgaged to her headline-watching advisors. And while the deal Stephen Harper signed giving equal weight to ridings instead of votes in the Conservative runoff may yet be his undoing, Ms. Stronach's approach suggests more strongly than ever that her old-Tory cabal is a tone-deaf cargo cult awash in faddism.

These people looked silly enough lining up behind a candidate who didn't know how to deliver a written speech properly. Now they are borrowing strategies from the disaster of the century in American politics. I personally believe that Joe Trippi is closer to genius than madman, but the Belinda Stronach campaign seems like the worst possible place to road-test his approach. The early verdict on the Dean campaign must surely be that it was great at raising money and awful at converting money into votes. Ms. Stronach already has more money than God. The Dean campaign was designed to turn a huge fund of grassroots energy into practical political power. Ms. Stronach is an invented candidate with no track record, creates genuine excitement only amongst men with a fetish for icy blondes, and speaks in a halting monotone that is the opposite of Gov. Dean's improvisational, impassioned bluster.

However you interpret Trippi-ism -- as a failed idea, or as a great idea undone by a weak candidate -- there is no logical way for it to work here. If Gov. Dean was weak, then Belinda Stronach, despite discernible improvements, can only be described as halfway between "feeble" and "cadaverous." Gov. Dean attracted attention, as generations of bright Democratic party comets have done before him, with promises to "take back the White House" from overmighty moneyed interests. Ms. Stronach is an overmighty moneyed interest.

Logic is rarely, if ever, the strong suit of professional political advisors. They are creatures of habit, folklore, and intuition, and since the public manifestly doesn't think clearly, they can't afford to. The new Conservative party certainly can't afford to be the last one to try new tactics. If Belinda.ca ends in tears, its novel ideas can be surgically extracted for the greater Conservative good. But remember: The trick is to figure out which ones are actually worth keeping. (Feb. 27, 2004)

And while we're talking of charts, have a look at this scatter diagram of economic globalization vs. gender equality, as measured by the UN in 50 or so countries. Sure, it's the UN, they pull these numbers out of their butts... but are feminist opponents of globalization capable of making the case that the elegant information presented herein is untrustworthy? Without dropping dead of pure hypocrisy, I mean. Note that the United States is positioned higher on the gender-related development index than the touchy-feely Dominion. Shame, shame on us!

I got this link from the Swedish classical-liberal Johan Norberg, who notes a new Swedish book against Islamism entitled Det är demokratin, dumbom! I'm no master of Scandinavian languages, but can he be telling us "It's the democracy, stupid"?

Speaking of sports, Dave at BaseballGraphs.com is now playing around actively with the Cosh bubble diagram (he likes it better with polygons instead of bubbles). I've got some pretty weird findings about the NHL playoffs I need to write up--there'll be a link here when I get around to it. In the meantime, let me pose this teaser: how would you feel about a Montreal-Boston conference final in the East this year?

Well, the Oilers called my bluff. A month after I criticized the front office for trading away hard-luck Finnish goalie Jussi Markkanen, what do they do but go out and grab Markkanen and Petr Nedved from the Rangers in exchange for a bag of sunflower seeds. Funnily enough, I believe intellectually that the Oilers' playoff run is probably doomed this time around; I might not have recommended this trade. But I'm foursquare behind the boys, and I have a soft spot for Soviet defectors like Nedved. Now I just need Jussi to make me look like a genius.

If there's a good deal of ruin in a nation, there must be more yet in an established multinational food giant like McDonald's--not that there is any company like McDonald's. But as marketing ideas go, narrowing your menu to make yourself more popular seems like an unusually strong sign of no longer knowing which end is up.

There hasn't been a slow-motion corporate disaster like this since New Coke. Consider how much of McDonald's marketing is already predicated on tacit nostalgia--feed your kids the same slop you loved! (McDonald's non-nostalgic advertising is simply self-defeating; some of it joins in the perpetual churn of therapeutic hectoring that can only drive customers away, and the rest merely insults the intellect.) This approach is a hidden preview of the endgame, a glimpse into the future at a dramatically shrunken North American McDonald's that serves Big Macs as a gustatory oddity for $10 and actually reintroduces Super-Sized fries as an ironic treat for 55-year-old Gen-Xers.

The brand is already dead in North America, though it will flourish abroad for generations as a symbol of America. The right corporate strategy here is to turn a certain fraction of the restaurants into style-conscious "Classic McDonald's"-es and radically reinvent the supply-chain procedures in the rest so that they can serve fresh, customized food as healthy as the consumer wants it. (Gasp! Is that... a tomato I spy?) How long it will be exactly before the chain is in enough agony to grasp this nettle, I don't know.

Wow... maybe the Cosh bubble diagram for pitchers is my best crack at immortality through eponymity. The long-suffering rooters on the Red Sox Nation forums are now generating their own versions, charting the career paths of individual pitchers like Greg Maddux and Roger Clemens (and adding wrinkles like changing the dot colour when the player gets traded). Superb! While I still have some influence over my brainchild, let me suggest that manufacturers of these diagrams might like to consider getting rid of the indicator lines on the chart parallel to the X-axis, and instead add sloping lines passing through the origin and showing various K/BB ratios.

The Volokh Conspiracy is trying to get to the bottom of whether the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia refuses to grant visas to Jews. There's been an intriguing, semi-related development in the chess world just this week.

As I've mentioned a couple of times here, the chess elite is currently trying to unify the sport's world championship title, an essential element of credibility for promoting and marketing the game. Chess needs a single champion in the tradition of Karpov, Fischer, Botvinnik, Tal, and Capablanca. For the past few years there has been a traditional-style head-to-head champion (currently the Russian Vladimir Kramnik) and also several annual, separate world champions recognized by FIDE, the old but somewhat discredited governing body of chess. FIDE and the great grandmasters are basically trying to get their act together, but progress has been slow.

A world championship semifinal has been arranged for this fall between Kramnik and Hungary's Peter Leko. FIDE is supposed to arrange its own playoff to select a combatant to face the world's strongest player, Garry Kasparov, in another semifinal. FIDE is currently run and bankrolled by the autocratic strongman of the Republic of Kalmykia, the extremely dodgy Kirsan Ilyumzhinov. Ilyumzhinov has been aggressive about placing high-level chess tournaments in curious corners like Tehran and Saigon, and now he has declared his intention to bring the invitational FIDE playoff to Tripoli. The only hitch is that Libya won't admit Israeli nationals, and it is unlikely it would admit anyone with an Israeli stamp in his passport.

This is--to understate the matter--a big problem for a Category XVIII+ chess tournament. Chessplayers are somewhat notorious for following the smell of money and suppressing conscience when necessary, but participating in the hasty rehabilitation of Colonel Gadhafi may be a bit much to swallow, whether for Jewish players or anyone else with a lingering sense of common decency. (Will British GM Mickey Adams want to bow, scrape, and smile in the longtime safe harbour of the Lockerbie suspects?) Ilyumzhinov says he hopes to smooth over the problem, but there is talk of sequestering excluded players in Malta if necessary and holding the games involving them there. This would seem to involve logistical improbabilities (non-excluded players crossing the Mediterranean overnight to their next game?), not to mention new questions about exactly what brand of crack Ilyumzhinov is smoking.

My thoughts on the bissextile Oscar ceremony cannot be of much interest, since I hadn't followed the race and have seen hardly any of the nominated movies. I do think the telecast gets better every year. The producers have gradually been stunned into learning that the show is television and not cabaret, and they have almost completely stopped bullying the winners with obtrusive music cues--not only because winners now come prepared with short speeches, but also, I think, because it's been realized that the speeches are the memorable, important part of the show. Long gone, and little regretted, are the condescending, doltish, five-minute, Cinema-for-Dummies explanations of why exactly there is an award for Best Achievement in Editing. Now they just sort of go "Editing is pretty important: here are the nominees." Christ, thank you for figuring out that the public has been watching movies for a hundred fucking years and now understands some of the rudiments of the form.

Like everyone else, I'd like for Billy Crystal to assume the post of permanent host, which he could have for the asking. I don't know why he has so much trouble accepting that this is the job he was born to do, and that people like him better in it more than they will Analyze This VI: Analyze Anything. No doubt it's very taxing and challenging to host the Oscars, but they come only once a year. You don't hear Santa Claus whining about his goddamn job.

There is usually more disappointment than delight in an Oscar ceremony. I was willing to tolerate the much-deserved New Zealand Film Industry Reunion, but Michael McKean and Annette O'Toole ought to have won Best Song for "A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow", a song which sends up Ian & Sylvia with unsparing accuracy and yet manages to be at least as charming as the finest productions of its target--not to speak of the pivotal narrative role it played in A Mighty Wind. Instead, the statuette was given to some piece of lugubrious orchestral frippery from the closing credits of Lord of the Rings. This crosses the line between due recognition of a daring achievement and some kind of wild elf-madness.

And Bill Murray, who in all justice could have four or five Oscars by now, was robbed (and even slightly humiliated) in order to pay back Sean Penn for going back on foolish threats to retire from acting and chalking up a couple hundred days without having assaulted anyone. Whatta sport! I haven't even seen Lost in Translation or Mystic River, but how many of these Method-acting intensity guys is Bill Murray worth, honestly? Honestly?

I await grimly the self-back-patting of the Canadian government, which was thanked for its support during the victory speech for Les Invasions Barbares. It is the first Canadian movie ever to win Best Foreign-Language Film, an award first presented in 1947. By all accounts Invasions is a remarkable movie, but Canadian government support of feature films may still bring to mind the old Latin saying "The mountains laboured, but delivered only a mouse."

In today's National Post:

Conservative leadership candidate Tony Clement has been making waves with a campaign promise he calls JumpStart 250: He wants to make the first $250,000 of a person's lifetime earnings tax free. I can't possibly be the only 32-year-old in Canada -- the only one to have crawled painfully past the quarter-million line after a decade or so of toil and uncertainty -- to have had the reaction, "Hey, chuck you, Farley." But since I may be the only one with a newspaper column, I feel obliged to go on record.

One must note that Mr. Clement's tax break for twentysomethings is presented amid an ambitious and attractive plan of tax cuts for everybody. He wants to gradually crank down the lowest rate to 15%, move the threshold for the middle bracket to $50,000 a year, have the top rate kick in only at $100,000 and increase RRSP contribution limits. This is radical stuff, and he thinks he can make it work while running a balanced budget and boosting health transfers and defence spending. One assumes -- or, rather, deduces -- that his vague talk of "cutting waste" in government is code for a delightful arson spree against Liberal programs. He deserves credit for being less elliptical than his opponents about tax reform.

And I hate to criticize a guy for making daring policy proposals, or, above all, for doing something to explicitly address the brain drain. All that said, giving a special and total tax break to new wage-earners might not be the best way of addressing the generational inequities in our welfare state. Let's start by getting rid of those inequities, instead of larding the system with counter-inequities. My comfortable retirement has already been stolen and given to a public school teacher somewhere: It's unlikely that anyone can change that now. But Tony's special solicitousness about taxpayers in the bloom of their 20s adds insult to injury. He wants to dramatically downsize government, but would nonetheless shift more of the burden for what's left onto the ageing Generation X.

A nice novelty, this, to be greeted with in one's post-prime, along with hair loss and back pain. Sure, I'm making a selfish argument here -- just as the cherry-cheeked youngsters who support the Clement plan are making a selfish argument. The difference is, only one of us is making a selfish argument for equal treatment.

I acknowledge the Canadianistic cleverness in recasting young wage-earners as a victim group, and therefore deserving of a government preference, but everyone who pays taxes in this country is a victim, whether he be 50 or 20. Mr. Clement's proposal may be meant as a ploy to capture the loyalty of college students, who have plenty of spare time for the scut-work of campaigning and who are more likely to be radical conservatives than entitlement-rich Baby Boomers are. He is probably aware that Stephen Harper may well be given one chance to lead the party into an election, but if Mr. Harper doesn't overturn the Liberal majority, he probably won't get a second one. In the meantime, if we're stuck with five more years of Liberal cancer, Mr. Clement can spend the whole time preaching the gospel of JumpStart 250.

Economically, it's puzzling to see a conservative smuggling a new, hidden element of progressivity into the tax system when, judging by his rhetoric, he seems more determined than anyone else to flatten it. For most people, the first $250,000 they earn is the $250,000 they earn slowest (God, I hope this proves true for me). In his Feb. 19 speech to the Confederation Club of Kitchener, Mr. Clement pointed out that "Right now the Liberals increase your taxes by almost 40% the moment you make more than $32,000." I find this sort of redistributionist hurdle pretty irritating myself, but how much more irritating is it to replace it with one based -- rather weirdly -- on prior earnings? The Liberals will surely be able to come after Prime Minister Clement in 2008 with the charge that once you've earned $250,000 altogether, he increases your taxes by a ratio that actually works out to infinity.

As far as the long-term future of conservatism goes, JumpStart 250 would accomplish one very bad thing: It would eliminate the salutary sticker-shock young people now experience when they join the labour force. How many left-skewed hazy-headed goofballs graduate from university every year, find an entry-level job they think will provide a decent lifestyle, and have their political universe turned upside-down by the hole in that first paycheque? I'd hate to think those people will have their much-needed consciousness-raising delayed for five to 10 years.

Really, it would only take one change to make JumpStart 250 a perfectly sound idea, and a much bolder one: We take away the tax burden from young wage-earners, and take away their vote, too. Quid pro quo.(Feb. 23, 2004)