Having said all that, it looks like Cassels & co. intend to be thoroughly brutal with the underpaid hacks who do medical reporting for the mass media; they're yanking fistfuls of stars away from articles I might have waved through as an editor. So now we're all on notice, which is exactly the idea. (And the self-appointed media monitors would want me to direct you to this list of the major supporters of IMPACS, the registered charity that underwrites their work.)

Caviare to the general: I think I can now die in peace--

I am one of the ten people in the world who noticed that Robert Sean Leonard was curled up on the couch with the 1987 Bill James Baseball Abstract in the closing montage of tonight's House, M.D. My reaction wasn't even hey, it's the Abstract!; it was hey, it's the '87! Strange to see an old friend turn up on television like that. I doubt you'd see many doctors reading Bill James in the real world, and more's the pity...

Maybe I should write a book (and quickly, before Thomas Friedman does it)... India is now building a security fence on its border with Bangladesh, joining other powers in the New Muralism movement I trendspotted last month. (þ: Fulford @ VDare)

Reader (and occasional Batter's Box slugger) Craig Burley writes to say he was a little taken aback by the data presented below.

DAMN, YOUR WINTERS [all-caps expletive deleted]. This from a Maritimer born and bred. I don't know how you can take those winters. I'd rather have the Halifax "120 days of slush" program.

I was surprised to get such a strong reaction. For starters, my oldest friend moved to Halifax for a few years right around the time the big odometer ticked over to 2000 A.D., and I don't know if it was just bad luck or what, but at a time when Edmonton winters were relatively mild, he seemed to have to cope with a ridiculous number of extreme snow events owing to the North Atlantic. This was made more difficult because he had to reckon with an antiquated, frankly comic oil-based system of home heating (I think whaling may have been involved), and with massive and universal civic confusion about how best to deal with snow on roads and sidewalks. I suspect this is why Craig is freaking out about the open secret that it is snowy in Edmonton in November; he imagines senior citizens and unschooled children trapped in draughty hundred-year-old houses that don't have BTUs flowing automatically out of a tap downstairs.

(Side note: a constant source of mirth to my migrant friend, who has since returned to Alberta, was the visible difficulty that natural-gas companies have in marketing to Atlantic customers. Apparently they have to spend an inordinate amount of time placating superstitious fears of spontaneous explosion in places where everyone's named MacDonald and no one's ever travelled west of Fredericton. I guess coal miners and methane don't mix well, even after a couple of generations on the surface.)

Anyway, people in Edmonton talk a lot about the onset of snow, but on its own it's not something that bothers us overmuch. We live in one of the most car-dependent cities on the planet, and driving is much easier when it's ten below and the snow is crunchy than it is when the temperature is wobbling around zero and you're never sure whether freezing rain or black ice will be on the menu. Blowing, fresh snow can be a terrible hazard at night, particularly on the highways, but the conventional blanket of fresh, well-behaved snow troubles nobody. From a pedestrian standpoint it is also a little easier to get around when surfaces aren't undergoing several state changes every week.

I think everybody here agrees, after they get a little experience dressing for the weather, that a calm, sunny December day with sharp sub-zero temperatures is really much nicer than, say, a plus-two day with a driving half-sleet. In winter and summer alike, Alberta gets more sun than any other province; it's rare for us to have a steady week of cold combined with unrelenting gray overcast. The beautifying effects of an urban snowfall are well known, and even an Edmontonian never quite loses his sentimental feeling for it. Those who dwell by the sea (or the Great Lakes) can never know one of life's grandest sensory pleasures--that achingly cold, preternaturally still prairie day when ice in the upper atmosphere smiths the sun into a perfect Giotto sphere of nuclear gold, the snow absorbs the reverberating din of civilization, and the vapour from buildings is rising perfectly straight into the sky, making an endless array of baroque ivory-gray columns.

It's not November and December that are difficult by any means; it's January and February, when the short days really start to play havoc with your brain and your skin and your vitamins and your hormones, and the weather really gets too cold to be borne for even a minute, and it feels like you can't quite escape from the marrow-leaching chill even under a duvet, and your neighbours and co-workers start to become pallid, snarly, and alcoholic. But let no one say that there are no compensations.

...at least if you live in Edmonton; otherwise it may at best be an amusing bit of original research. This chart depicts cumulative probability estimates of the date of the first permanent snow in Edmonton based on Environment Canada data from 1971-2004. "Permanent" here just means snow that falls and stays put, without melting away, until spring. I'd like to have gone back further, but 1970 seems to represent the approximate beginning of the current "era" of climate, and it does take a little effort to find the date on which the ground is covered for good for any given year. (The records only show whether there was snow on the ground on any given morning; you have to keep ploughing forward to make sure there wasn't a late melt-off, and even then some incidents of mid-day melting may have been missed). The median date of winter-long snow-cover is Remembrance Day, which is probably a little later than most Edmontonians would have guessed--I suspect most of us think of Halloween as the break-even point.

I hope the chart doesn't require any more explanation than this, but feel free to write with questions if it's confusing. The two years in the study period for which snow was absent on Christmas, or still destined to melt, were 2002 (Dec. 29) and 1997 (when the first permanent snow actually arrived on New Year's Day 1998).

In the comments to this entry at Covered In Oil, there's a slightly nasty joke about how twitchy and vacillating Edmonton Oilers fans have been lately, especially during the recent five-game losing streak. We can all laugh about it now, but people were turning positively feral for a little while there. You had the sense that most of the callers on the sportstalk shows were gently cradling fresh-greased firearms, uncertain whether to use them on themselves or the team's front-office personnel. I was in a bar to witness the low point of the streak, a 7-1 loss to Colorado. The mood in the bar had me mentally mapping the exits and trying to devise some stylish Kurt Russell response to sudden collective savagery. Whyte Avenue is a little violent and hysterical anyway on an ordinary evening, and has been known to suffer inexplicable riots; the game provided what any hockey fan would regard as a fairly solid pretext for a delirious tarantella of drunken chaos.

I wonder if it's a coincidence that the real war on the Battle of Alberta weblog has involved Flames-loving host Matt sitting back, smirking, and pretending to hover loftily above his own team's struggles while the Oiler fans who comprise the majority of the site's readership rend their flesh like teenage goths. Calgary hasn't been discernibly better than the Oilers this year, and its fans were habituated to much higher expectations in the pre-season. The team was even tipped to win the Stanley Cup by the thinly-educated guessers at Sports Illustrated. Since I only get to hear my own city's talk radio, I have no idea whether the Zen calm Matt attempts to project is widely shared, or whether our southern twin is as full of whimpering neurotics as Edmonton is. My instinctive suspicion is that the Flames' ticketholders are mostly bedwetting corporate lawyers who grew up resenting jocks and never quite cottoning to Peter Puck's explanation of the offside rule. Too busy to give a maiden aunt's crap about hockey: that's Calgary. Don't you know it's hard work transforming a worldwide energy crisis into a giant pyramid of cocaine and fifty-dollar beefsteaks?

It would probably be wisest for Edmontonians facing the strenuous tides of a long season to hold fast to the sweater-hem of Chris Pronger. For as long as he remains healthy, no one need fear paying the price of a ticket or a PPV broadcast, for at the very least you will be able to say one day that you saw Pronger. He is a player unique even in the garlanded annals of Oilerdom; since 1995 or so, only Curtis Joseph has provided an equally unadulterated pleasure to the local hockey aesthete. We were warned by some at the time of the trade that Pronger was a half-crippled thug, long past his prime and never equal to his reputation. In truth, he remains that rare athlete who tilts the secret geography of the playing surface and irradiates it with an aura of overwhelming command. I find it astonishing that St. Louis did not do better in the playoffs for simply having had him around. In fact, I'm actually offended on behalf of Blues fans. You had this guy in his prime and you pissed it away? What the hell?

The Oilers, even in the worst times, have always been a fun team to watch--and this is widely recognized in other NHL cities, where Edmonton has remained an attendance draw well out of proportion to the team's quality. But it is a relief to root for someone who isn't (a) learning the game with agonizing slowness or (b) heroically overcoming limited talent. Eric Brewer, who was sent southeast in exchange for Pronger, was the archetypal fin-de-siècle Oiler. He was aged 26 when he departed in a flurry of press clippings about his inestimable promise--a promise that only grew in perceived size with every year in which the actual evidence failed to materialize. He is currently -12 in St. Louis despite being paired with the more-than-adequate Bryce Salvador. More tellingly, he has accrued 35 penalty minutes trying to contain enemy forwards in the "new NHL". Pronger's current total (eight minutes in all, earned while playing 28 minutes a night) qualifies him--without one hint of exaggeration or sarcasm--as history's unlikeliest candidate for the Lady Byng Trophy.

But urging good cheer is pointless. The Edmonton Oiler fan has been chosen for a special role in the dramaturgy of the National Hockey League. It is a role which fits him well. He is the modern analogue of the Russian serf--the man so preposterously incapable of resisting his own mistreatment at the hands of blackmailing capitalists and money-engorged players that a pan-global hockey revolution had to be concocted for his sake. Little can he guess what the wind will blow to the doorstep of his frost-laced lair; his instinct tells him that it cannot be anything too good. In a fog of superstitious inarticulacy, he awaits the hammerblow of history.

Nothing against the Accordion Guy, but his headline "Pillow Fight in Dundas Square This Sunday" suddenly made me loathe my own generation. Flash mobs, cuddle parties, neo-burlesque, robot pets, emo, speed dating, network gaming tournaments, live-action remakes of cartoons... I suppose if you'd really been on the ball, you could have figured out in advance what would pass for a culture amongst a bunch of grown-up latchkey kids, couldn't you?

Is there another site in the universe, I ask you, that delivers such greatness and such appalling awfulness in equal measure? You never do know what you'll get when you click on an ESPN link--it might be the last depraved rantings of some exquisite genius like Hunter S. Thompson, or the most ghastly flatus imaginable from some podunk beat writer.

Bill Simmons' Week 10 column on Terrell Owens, for example, may just be the single most brilliant thing Simmons has ever written. In the column Simmons consciously takes on an overwhelming mass of conventional wisdom and explodes it effortlessly, humiliating an entire universe of sports talking-heads in the process. How is it that a retired player was allowed to waltz into the training room and engage in a fistfight--a fistfight!!!--with one of the Philadelphia Eagles' starters? And why is Simmons pretty much the first person to ask this?

But then you flick over to Patrick Hruby's column on the notorious nude (women's) curling calendar.

...there's no novelty to naked curlers, nothing to lift the sport from the late-night netherworld of professional arm wrestling and John Basedow infomercials. More to the point, there's nothing to earn [designer Ana] Arce and company anything beyond a passing mention on "PTI"... The attention marketplace has never been more overcrowded.

Remember, you're reading these words thanks to a front-page link on ESPN.com, the most popular sports website in the universe, and one which has probably never before devoted as much space to curling as Hruby gives it in this one column. It's literally a self-refuting argument! Lamentably, "a passing mention on 'PTI'" is basically enough to double the Q-rating of the sport in the United States instantaneously. It's precisely because the attention marketplace is so crowded that the calendar is such a counterintuitive masterstroke (please, no snickers). And, of course, it's simply stupid to assert that the sport dwells in a "netherworld" amidst a bunch of bogus or dodgy activities; Hruby has outright slandered those few who know curling in the U.S., pretty much the entire population of Canada, and, hell, anyone else who passionately follows a minority sport. But in any event the entire premise of Hruby's column appears to be that he's personally growing bored of female nudity and that he thinks it would spice up his life if there were a little less of it about. So it's not an argument so much as a midlife crisis in verbal form.

Well, as a columnist I can recognize the characteristic stink of a phoned-in deadline-beater. And, as I say, you never do know what you'll get with ESPN.com; Hruby's previous column debunking the popular myths of the NBA was terrific.

Bonus link: oh, yeah, did I mention that they just hired Chuck Klosterman?

The era of globalization continues to turn into an era of walls as Russia seriously considers putting up a fence between itself and Chechnya. You read it here first...

Antonia Zerbisias has her guns pointed in the wrong direction in an early-morning weblog entry on the perfidy of American garrisons in Iraq:

The Internet is burning up with stories about chemical weapons--white phosphorus and Napalm--used by American forces on civilians last year in the attack on Fallujah.

Consider this a sort of science (or history) quiz: within the first 15 words of Zerb's entry, you should be shaking your head and/or spluttering with astonishment. To be sure, the antiwar left has never worried much about the implications of extending P.O.W. protections to combatants who don't wear uniforms and aren't members of the army of some particular state. Why, then, shouldn't it go on to transform "chemical weapons" into a phrase meant to include any weapon that is made from a chemical? This would cover literally everything in the universe, right down to a two-by-four with a nail through it.

But of course, that's not what the phrase "chemical weapons" has been used to mean, by anyone, for the past 120 years. The existing international accords define them as weapons that destroy human beings through their toxic effects. Phosphorus and napalm are for setting things on fire, and, like it or not, setting things on fire has always been pretty kosher in warfare. The U.S. government has tried to point this out, and has been greeted with baffled handwaving by people who can't tell phosphorus from phosgene. (That last link even quotes a definition of chemical weapons as toxics--and continues to stupidly press home the point it has just refuted, under the apparent misapprehension that Iraqis caught in the line of fire are somehow overdosing on white phosphorus.) Say it with me: if an American's using it, there's no such thing as a conventional weapon!

...the poppy is a trademark of the Legion and anyone who wants to use it has to apply. Otherwise it would be all over the place. There are numeorus [sic] examples where it has been used for sales and other purposes. As it is not in the public domain and because it is a registered trademark of the Legion the organization is taking every step it can to protect it (and I do mean every step). All this can be avoided in the future if you ask to use it on your site and you get the proper approval. Sorry, I know your heart and many others are in the right place. Unfortunately we have to protect this image or lose its use as a symbol of Remembrance. -Bob Butt, Director of Communications for the Canadian Legion, writing to Pierre Bourque

The Legion's legal pestering of Bourque enrages me, in the same way and for the same reasons as it would if some private organization tried to trademark the image of the Christ child. I never thought I was helping to remove a piece of our cultural heritage from the public domain by buying Remembrance Day poppies. And I am certainly surprised to learn that "Remembrance" itself has become anyone's formal property. I won't pay for or wear one ever again. And neither should you.

[UPDATE, 6:59 pm: After a couple thousand visits and an appearance on CJAD Montreal opposite Mr. Butt, I've received a grand total of zero negative letters about this entry. One correspondent did credit me with "brass balls"--but I thought rather the same thing of Butt when he pointed out on-air that Canada's poppy policy was originally inherited from the Royal British Legion. What, you may ask, is the British Legion's policy regarding unauthorized use of the poppy on individual websites? They actively encourage it. Bob's friends and neighbours are invited to let us know whether he clangs when he walks.]

you just need to follow Evan Kirchhoff's rule of thumb--as the arrondissement numbers get lower, the real trouble in Paris gets worse.

It is tempting for a columnist to look at the trouble in France and to try to make hay from it--but whose position does the widespread Muslim rioting in the poor suburbs support? It is an obvious embarrassment for the old kleptocratist President of the Republic, Chirac, and for his pet, Prime Minister Villepin; yet, as has been observed, it may be a worse embarrassment still for Chirac's maverick rival, Interior Minister Sarkozy. North American conservatives are tempted to regard the unrest as payback for France's lax immigration policies and softness in the Clash of Civilizations; but France has undeniably been more aggressive than the Anglo-Saxon countries in asserting a unitary national culture. (As the Ottawa Citizen's Dan Gardner pointed out to me not long ago, the French regard multiculturalism as just another one of our stupid innovations.) The riots are likely to be a headache for Europeans who want Turkey admitted to the European Union as a grown-up equal--yet the image of a French Muslim community adrift on the fringe of the metropolis, and denied the same opportunities that ethnic Europeans enjoy, is likely to provide a tempting metaphor for advocates of Turkish admission. The left (including Chirac) will follow up the riots by proposing measures for the amelioration of the condition of France's Muslims; no one, I suppose, will argue that the right answer would be to deliberately worsen it. But this will, like it or not, be a matter of acceding to blackmail. The creation of comfortable jobs for politically astute Muslim thugs will create a precedent for more rioting, and worse, not too far in the future--and not only in France.

Probably Barbara Amiel is right: the longtime tension between the French state and the Islamicized banlieues is merely a symptom, and treating it without addressing the underlying disorder is only likely to worsen matters. The question, then, is the nature of that underlying disorder--including whether it is curable. But even here there is room for disagreement. Did France invite trouble for itself by basing its immigration policy on the blood guilt arising from its Algerian adventures, or by means of the original colonialism, or by trying to protect an ideal, essential France from the blowback of its own crimes? The whole chain of events can be regarded as just one more instantiation of the long post-Columbian tragedy. Act One: white man blunders across a new world. Act Two: white man tries honestly to alleviate the condition of his poorer, more ignorant brother by means of trade and missionary activity, but finds himself increasingly harassed by Great Power rivals and implicated in the domestic concerns of what are rapidly becoming subjects. Act Three: white man abandons his colonial partners to their fate (and is blamed for callousness) or fights a rearguard action to preserve the empire (and is blamed for the inevitable death and torture). Act Four: white man tries to make amends by imposing an ethic of race equality at home and opening his borders and his institutions to his former victims. Every part of this drama proceeds logically from the one before, and at no time do any of the players behave according to totally dishonourable motives. But who knows how to arrange for something other than the seemingly inevitable Act Five?

That is why the conflagration in Paris is so troubling, if one weren't troubled solely for the sake of Paris herself. But it is easy to be too horrified here. Even by the worst accounts, France's Islamic rioters are less well-armed and inflicting less destruction than American blacks did in U.S. cities in the late 1960s--riots which themselves overlay the memory of much worse public disorder. (Score one for Euro gun culture: the French rioters haven't yet been able to do any worse to the police than to ambush them and plink away at them with pellet guns.) The parallel here seems obvious, and if it has any relevance, we are not presented with a simple matter of social unrest proceeding from a failure to integrate new immigrants, or from the presence of a foreign and violent faith. It's a question of warehousing members of a particular ethnic group in horrible, unsightly, cheaply-made housing projects. Theodore Dalrymple wrote the received text on Muslim alienation in suburban France more than three years ago: of him it can truly be said that he saw the Seine foaming with much blood.

Where does the increase in crime come from? The geographical answer: from the public housing projects that encircle and increasingly besiege every French city or town of any size, Paris especially. In these housing projects lives an immigrant population numbering several million, from North and West Africa mostly, along with their French-born descendants and a smattering of the least successful members of the French working class. From these projects, the excellence of the French public transport system ensures that the most fashionable arrondissements are within easy reach of the most inveterate thief and vandal.

Architecturally, the housing projects sprang from the ideas of Le Corbusier, the Swiss totalitarian architect--and still the untouchable hero of architectural education in France--who believed that a house was a machine for living in, that areas of cities should be entirely separated from one another by their function, and that the straight line and the right angle held the key to wisdom, virtue, beauty, and efficiency. The mulish opposition that met his scheme to pull down the whole of the center of Paris and rebuild it according to his “rational” and “advanced” ideas baffled and frustrated him.

The inhuman, unadorned, hard-edged geometry of these vast housing projects in their unearthly plazas brings to mind Le Corbusier’s chilling and tyrannical words: “The despot is not a man. It is the... correct, realistic, exact plan... that will provide your solution once the problem has been posed clearly... This plan has been drawn up well away from... the cries of the electorate or the laments of society’s victims. It has been drawn up by serene and lucid minds.”

I remember the mental image I formed when I read these words: as if submerged in a dream, I envisioned a Gallic Pruitt-Igoe--the classic public-housing disaster in its familiar shape, but fashioned with all the severity, fastidiousness, and stultifying bureaucratic sensibility of Corbu's own land. I nearly leapt from my chair when I saw the AFP wire photo at left yesterday. Here, truly, a picture is worth a thousand words, or even ten thousand.

The French rioting may be understood as the predictable legacy of those deformed 20th-century twins, modernism and the welfare state. The good news is that the cure--as American cities are gradually discovering--is as simple as reversing the policies in question (or at least modifying them to strip power from urban planners) and applying a little dynamite. But in the meantime, there is plenty of opportunity for these 20th-century problems to serve as the kernel for a genuine 21st-century European jihad.

[UPDATE, 6:53 pm: It turns out that when you show this picture to Torontonians, they blurt out "Jane and Finch" almost involuntarily, as though presented with some especially lurid Rorshach blot.]

Q: What curly-haired, tiny-penised broadcasting genius is ostentatiously absent from the announcement of Sirius Canada's satellite-radio channel lineup? Yeah, OK--Stern's show treaded water in the Toronto market, supposedly (while competing with cross-border Stern affiliates). So that means Sirius's Canadian storefront can't devote even 1% of its bandwidth to the biggest star in its medium?

I'm sure Canadian radio retailers who have been supporting Sirius are just thrilled to contemplate all the Christmastime satellite-receiver business that will now be driven into the gray market south of the border. And special thanks to the CRTC for helping things out by means of their preposterous claim to regulatory jurisdiction over satellite radio, not to mention their whimsical experiments in regulating terrestrial-radio content.

From the CBC this morning:

The leader of the New Democrats says he's asked [Prime Minister Paul] Martin to consider adopting a number of measures put forward by his party--such as the ethics reform package, protection for pensions and the environment and a renewed commitment to public health care--before making a decision.

"If [Martin is] willing to take action on a few key issues over the next few weeks, then perhaps we can wait until the election in the winter," said [Jack] Layton. "If not, then clearly the parliament serves no positive purpose."

It's the same old Jack Layton position: give the NDP what it wants on key issues, and we'll continue to prop up the minority government. And Stephen Harper is taking up the same old Stephen Harper position, insisting in the teeth of the numbers that the government should fall now--and, in the process, ostentatiously refusing to play Layton's "game." The goal appears to be establishing in the mind of the voter that the NDP's conditional support for the Liberals means that a vote for the NDP is a vote for the Liberals.

The first observation to make here is that it simply isn't so. I hold to the mesmerizingly contrarian view that a vote for the NDP is a vote for the NDP. Since the war, the New Democrats have been spectacularly successful in carrying out their long-term socialist program through the medium of the Liberal Party. Granted, the means of production remain largely un-nationalized in Canada--but a pretty sizable fraction of them remain in the hands of monopolists beholden to the state and protected from foreign competition. That makes a nice first approximation, and in the meantime the state has gradually taken over health, education, marriage, child-rearing, the welfare of the aged, and the conduct of small business--in short, daily life. Leaving aside Layton's own squishy non-commitment to "socialism", why would he abandon a tactic that has always lost election battles for the NDP, and won ideological wars?

The second (closely related) observation is that there is not now much point in trying to strip votes from the New Democrats by conflating them with the Liberals. The New Democrats would have been long since dead and buried if this logic were at all convincing to NDP supporters.

I suspect that at the 2004 polls Jack Layton (and Ed Broadbent) merely brought the New Democrats back to their natural level in the popular vote. About one-sixth of us, I think, are simply New Democrat by nature--old hippies floating in internal exile, overgrown red-diaper babies, identitarians of various flavours, Gaia-worshipping vegans, and, above all, workers for whom The Union represents the sum of their aspirations and the totality of their intelligible thought. These people, and especially those in the latter category, may stay home if they're asked to vote for some insincere schoolmarmish warhorse like Alexa McDonough. Give them a grinning, attractive regular-guy who speaks in complete sentences and they'll turn out.

Barring the "Third Way" species of self-reinvention that the party continues to resist, it is hard for me to see the New Democrats ever getting 20% of the vote in a Canadian election again. (I bet publicly against the NDP getting 20% in '04, at a time when people were whispering "Official Opposition", and it was the one thing I got right about the outcome.) But until the party gets rid of Jack Layton it should continue to draw the maximum vote possible. It's a Kuhnian process. Mortality should cause the NDP vote ceiling to sink slowly, but then again there are new fools being born every day.

The third observation is that, on the premise that a party leader cares most about the ideas for which his party stands, no position other than Layton's is remotely practical. When it comes to the morality of the Liberals, elected House members have to live with the Canadian public's most recent judgment. I don't think the Gomery report, largely a stylish exercise in collating known facts, will change the underlying public perception much. Sure, my own belief is that the Liberal Party of Canada is a cult dedicated to the solipsistic proposition that it is the literal ostensive definition of Canada, and to the corollary that the rest of us are "Canadian" only insofar as we serve the party's interests by endorsing the party's vision of history, progress, and the constitutional order. If this were more broadly recognized, more people would turn against the Liberals. At some level this perhaps is what the electorate recognizes when it "grows tired of Liberal government" every few decades. Obviously Stephen Harper must work to accelerate this fatigue process, even if he never sees a personal reward for the effort.

In the meantime I don't think anyone would hold it against him for too long if he, like Layton, were to present the Liberals with a list of ideological policy demands. But maybe that's the real question: do today's Conservatives actually have a wish list? (One, I mean, beyond No Queer Weddings In My Backyard?) Harper, after all, ran tacitly for the Canadian Alliance leadership as the man who was willing to treat the party as a vehicle for ideas rather than as a professionalized cabal of jobhunters hoping to win an elaborate game of Red Vs. Blue. It seemed like a good idea to some of us at the time. But the scent of ultimate power convinced Harper to accept the values of a press corps capable of comprehending and covering politics only as a spectator sport.

...be sure to look for my reaction in tomorrow morning's National Post. Are we quite sure the judge knows the precise meaning of that word "exonerated"?

[Update, Nov. 2: My column is now on newsstands, and it is one of Norman Spector's "Columns I Wish I'd Written" for the day. Not such an easy honour to glean, unless you are named "Jim Travers" or "Chantal Hébert". Spector's page has a long excerpt from the column for those of you who can't afford the four bits for a Post.

If I can be allowed a digression, isn't there something dreadfully compelling about Spector's "CIWIW" feature and its analogues, "The Column I'm Glad I Didn't Write" and "Idiocy of the Day"? If you're a columnist who's also a sports fan, you can't help interpreting appearances on these pages as wins and losses. I don't even think it matters much how highly you regard Spector, though I have considerable respect for him; the won-loss metaphor would be irresistible (and the "losses" traumatizing) even if Joe Illiterate were making the choices. At the moment I think my record is 3-1 or thereabouts, which makes me, what, a serviceable spot reliever?

Yes, it sounds idiotic, but pretty much every semi-notable columnist who reads this page is nodding in agreement right now...]

My apologies for remaining so scarce over the weekend. I fell ill Friday afternoon and spent the weekend racked with fever and comically agonizing headaches, but with none of the respiratory or digestive symptoms that usually come with late-autumn flu. It required 24 hours a day to tend to my male self-pity and to alternate between desperately trying to get warm and frantically trying to cool off.

I spent a lot of time listening to sports radio, which is what I do when I'm immobile under a mountain of blankets and not thinking too clearly anyway. There's this Levitra ad they keep playing--have you heard this thing? I have trouble making sense of its slender audio, but I gather the premise is that some middle-aged guy is shambling out onto the porch with a newspaper when he sees his wife or his girlfriend (perhaps a neighbour?) gesturing sensuously to him from an upstairs window. You hear him racing off to get some, and then the traditional verbless voiceover: "Levitra: because life should be spontaneous."

Um, so, do I have this straight? They're now using "spontaneity" to sell planned, chemically-induced erections?