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Media Empires are Hard to Conceptualize, So Don't Even Try
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Thumbs Up / Down
8.7.2002 by , every Wednesday.
Raymond Moriyama
 All right, I know I gave a thumbs down to the Canadian War Museum when they sent poor old Raymond, Big Name Canadian Architect, back to the drawing board after his three design proposals for the new museum building drew a yawn from the public. Still, I have to admit that the new building seems at least as cool as any of the original three - it is sure to be quite a landmark on future Ottawa postcards. It combines a few elements from the original designs - the striking wedge shape from one, the whimsy of the second, and most importantly, the "emerging landscapes" theme from the third. The idea, as explained by Moriyama, is a message about how war changes landscapes - on several metaphorical levels. Cool. Of course there is the question about how they are going to mow the roof...
Joe Clark
 Well, I just spent 2 days in the US and so it was a shock on my return to see the newspaper headlines about Joe Clark deciding to resign. I didn't know whether to give him a thumbs up or a thumbs down, but I needed another down, so there you go. It's quite sad to see Joe leave as leader of Canada's only other centrist party - he's an excellent speaker, a sharp debater, and that most oxymoronic of things, an honest politician. And the list of people who might succeed him isn't encouraging at all - four nobodys (Peter McKay? Peter Who?) and one somewhat distasteful somebody (Mike Harris - Uhh, no thanks...). Where the hell is bloody Jean Charest when you need him? Oh yeah, he's off wasting his time in Québec telling the government to print more forms in English or something equally stupid. Well, there you go - I'd say this is probably the last nail in the PC coffin, and look what we're going to be left with - the Alliance's brand of redneck conservatism, the NDP's...I-don't-know-what-but-it-doesn't-really-matter, the BQ (whatever) and of course the old tried-and-true-and-lame Liberals. Boooring. So sorry to see you go, Joe.
Dyane Adam
It’s nice to see a chick who has nuts. No, no, I don’t mean the kind you run into when you step into the wrong kind of nightclub. I mean like Dyane Adam, Commissioner of Official Languages, who had the cojones necessary to point out the silliness of maintaining the Bilingualism Bonus – a policy invented in the 1960s to encourage people softly to learn French if they were unilingual, letting them stay in jobs that were (or should have been) officially bilingual if they were willing to forego the bonus. Sneaky, eh? Well anyhow, if the Treasury Board follows her advice, the bonus will go, and a Bilingual Job will be a Bilingual Job, and if those too lazy to learn French don’t like it, they can lump it. Hopefully this will have a side effect of separating the wheat from the chaff – “lazy narrow-minded Anglophones need not apply.” Beauty.
Carlos Baladron
So this guy leads a delegation from Cuba to World Youth Day, escorted of course by Cuban Police, and twenty-three of them manage to escape. Then he whines about how there was this big Canadian Conspiracy to coerce the Cubans into staying and claiming refugee status. Yes, I’m sure there was. An enormous conspiracy. I’m sure it went right up to the Prime Minister. He probably, upon hearing about World Youth Day, picked up a Red Phone on his desk and yelled down the line at the Immigration Minister “Dammit, I want doze dwenty-tree Cubans, do whaddever it take, ostie tabernac, or you wind up like Paul Martin!”. And so Immigration parachuted undercover “Catholics” into Toronto under cover of darkness to convince said Cubans deceivingly that they’d be better off in a country where trying to leave doesn’t get you shot, and being gay doesn’t get you in jail. They must have drugged the guys too, no doubt about it. Yes, folks, this is almost as big as the JFK assassination. Almost.
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