This weekend I will be live on the Transom.org web site, liveblogging the Radio Without Boundaries conference, arguably the apex of the Deep Wireless Festival. In a strange way it will be like returning home after a long trip.

Back in 2003 I was part of the group that created Transmissions sans Frontières, the first Radio Without Boundaries conference. TSF followed on the heels of the first Third Coast Festival in Chicago in 2001. Like Third Coast the focus was on radio, but with a strong streak of experimental and boundary pushing work that (during Third Coast’s first year) went well beyond the National Public Radio influenced works heard in Chicago.

What we discovered was a community of producers and listeners who craved works like those presented. People who saw in radio possibilities that went far beyond what they were hearing on commercial radio, the CBC, and NPR. People who either already knew of visionaries like R. Murray Schafer, Peter Leonhard Braun, and Willem de Ritter, or new listeners who just knew that radio was something more than what they were hearing.

We pleased some people, we challenged and confused a couple, and we sent everyone home with new ears and new attitudes. We brought together CBC types, NPR types, pirate radio types, artists, critics, and fans, mixed them all up, and watched the sparks fly.

That conference in many ways paid homage to some of the people who shaped my radiophonic sensibilities – Hank Bull and Patrick Ready, whose weekly HP Radio Show was one that was never to be missed, and to the late Howard Broomfield, who approached sound with a reverence and exuberance that has remained unmatched.

Life being what it is, I haven’t really been able to attend Radio Without Boundaries since that first year, even though I’ve had the pleasure of managing the New Adventures web site for many years. In some strange fashion I have lived vicariously though the pictures and biographies and listings that I posted there.

This year I was asked to be part of the team liveblogging the last week of Deep Wireless. I consider that quite an honour.

I have always seen myself as more of an observer of art than a participant – and yes, I should change that – so I take this as a challenge to immerse myself in the works and people, and to reflect to the Transom audience the essence of Radio Without Boundaries.

I am thrilled.

A month or so back I was thinking about my love affair with radio, and was able to trace it back even further, to one radio program, and one DJ. I wrote about him on my own blog, and since than have found out that although he has traveled half way around the world, and has had at least a couple of careers, he’s still making radio.

So as I head into this week I dedicate it to Bob Gourlay, and the hours that I spent listening to his show, the Crystal Sound Barrier.

Oh My God!!! The Victoria Day weekend is here, and brings media reports everywhere that young people are doing stupid and dangerous things with fireworks.

We must warn them! Someone could lose an eye! And… OH MY GOD!!

They’re posting videos of this behavior on the Internet!!

Hey folks, I’ll clue you into something. Forty years ago it was my friends who were doing equally stupid things with fireworks.

Guess what? We already knew that it was dangerous, and all of us were bright enough to avoid injury.

And likely the kids in the video also know quite well that they could hurt themselves. Although short of losing an eye, I’m not sure how much real harm a roman candle will do at thirty feet. Maybe if your t-shirt catches fire.

But they’re posting videos of this behavior on the Internet!!

And?? Forty years ago we had no Internet and we still figured out how to do stupid things with fireworks.

Tell you what, let’s forget the fireworks and spend the same energy writing to our political leaders about child poverty or the environment.

(Side note: the biggest spike in weekend traffic was from people coming here when they were trying to find out where the fireworks displays were happening in Hamilton. Which suggests that once again myhamilton.ca didn’t have that information. )

Risk seems to be the topic of the week. I guess that it’s one of those things that once you start looking for it you see it everywhere.

In the news this week was a story about Tanya Dumstrey-Soos, who was killed by a Siberian Tiger in northern BC.

Almost immediately the call went out to regulate private zoos (not a bad idea generally) and then to ban ownership of all “exotic” animals.

This same sort of simpleminded solution leads to things like the muzzling and sterilization of any dog in Ontario that kind of sort of might look like it could be a pit pull. That law likely does nothing for public safety, but it does mean that my neighbour’s cute and cuddly puppy has to have its head wrapped in a cage every time that she walks it.

Because we can’t eliminate the risk that some dog might bite someone, the politicians chose to enact a law that makes dogs that look a certain way illegal. Yes, it’s not just pit-bulls that are restricted, its any dog that someone thinks looks like a pit-bull.

A dog that has an appearance and physical characteristics that are substantially similar to those of dogs referred to in any of the above categories.

(I’ll ignore discussions of whether pit-pulls, the breed, are naturally vicious, or whether it’s the owners that train them to be that way, but will remind you that short of DNA testing it’s pretty much impossible to say that any given dog is part “pit-bull”. )

Back to the tigers.

Did Dumstrey-Soos just happen to walk on front of a wild tiger? Did someone tell her that they were cute and cuddly and she should play with them? Did she not know that they were wild animals, and animals with very large teeth and claws?

Of course not.

Dumstrey-Soos understood that tigers and other large animals are dangerous, that they could cause her great injury and even death.

She understood the risk, and felt that the joys of spending time with these great cats outweighed the possibility that they might harm her.

Sadly she was wrong, and that is a tragedy, but she weighed the risks and decided that her life would be richer for spending time with these animals.

If I was given the chance to walk into that pen with a handler and meet these great creatures I would take it in a minute. I probably wouldn’t turn my back on the cats, but ultimately I’d decide that the risk was low enough that I wished to take it.

What would you do?

At the same time that a generation of Facebook and MySpace users are abandoning long held expectations of privacy, large corporations are scrambling to demonstrate how much they are doing to protect their customer’s personal information.

Much of this is driven by news stories about losses of thousands or hundreds of thousands of customer records, the kind of story that seems to appear almost weekly.

Twenty years ago the customer records of a large company would fill many file cabinets, or a mainframe computer kept behind locked doors. Now all that you need is one boneheaded employee who manages to lose a laptop and your entire customer database is gone. (more…)

I finally got set up with WordPress stats so that I could track the activity here on the site. Probably the most intriguing discovery is which posts seem to be most popular.

1. Bulls… Nudity… DC… Gotta be a Joke by a big margin.
2. Invasion of the Giant Chicago Women
3. Anything about Avalide
4. Anything about Primus. Oh God, not Primus
5. Japanese Sound effects

Go figure…

I that Bjork? I love Bjork, her music, some of her acting, her incredible costumes. Her smile – I love her smile! And that wild Icelandic accent.

And on occasion I’ve enjoyed vodka.

When I saw this ad though my first reaction was to think that it was plugging the new Spiderman movie. The blue and red costume says Spidey to me. Even the pattern on the dress looks like the webmeister’s costume.

Was that intentional, or did some ad designer miss an important cue?

And if it was intentional, what exactly was the advertiser hoping to accomplish? Attract teenagers? Attract web designers? Attract people who like blue and red?

And ultimately, can I remember the name of the vodka?

Nope.

But then again after seeing this ad, I may change my mind. “You could still make the lady a President… That is unless you think the lady’s only good for one thing.”

Hmmm… unless it’s real! What can I say about “skyscraping respect”?

Your Award: Barry Rueger

The professionals’ awards organizers acknowledge your contribution and achievement in your profession.
The professionals’ awards are awards of achievement presented to those that have made a milestone in their area of expertise.
Currently, winners are chosen based on their high profile and their excellence contribution to the development of their professions’. The winner of the award is decided by high custom build electronic award winning software

The prize of the award is USD$850,000.00 only. This is to enable you carry out further researches in your field for the development of humanity.

We sincerely have a sky-scraping respect for people who regardless of all obstruction, but strive hard to positively affect humanity, and do not preoccupied their mind with self exaltation and promotion of their work on the pages of news papers but allow their work to speaks for them. Surely your vocation would go a long way to improve a hi-tech development in our beautiful world.

You are to contact Jimmy Hamilton soonest to claim the award of US$850,000.00.

Note: all formatting, line breaks, grammar, and spelling are preserved from the original. 

A blistering attack by CBC writer Heather Mallick on the tyranny of endless school fundraising. And even better, she places the blame squarely on the neo-con agenda.

Parents are now being pressured to the point where they yearly raise more than half a billion dollars for Ontario schools. …
The money pays for playgrounds, team uniforms, textbooks, computers, library books and field trips. One school region even accepts money for buildings and swimming pools.

When schools take money from parents, it means schools in rich neighbourhoods get swim teams and terrible schools in poor areas get chalk. The money is no longer being spent on frills like recorder lessons and sports uniforms. It now pays for basics.

… All this is part of the world view dreamed up by the neo-cons. I call it a world view because it never seems to have a human view of the world as it is actually lived in by humans. The neo-cons’ chief weapon, apart from fear, is the demonization of taxes.

Parents will nod their heads knowingly, understanding that each kid in elementary school costs you about ten to twenty dollars a week in extra charges.

For extra fun, chceck out how one California school tries to dress up the bake sale game. It’s not fundraising on the backs on parents, its a Tradition!:

It is a tradition for the graduating class to leave money to the school. In order to accomplish this, the fifth grade holds several bake sales throughout the school year. To learn responsibility, the class makes the posters, bakes goods and sells them. They are also responsible for counting the money. The class discusses and votes on how the money should be used. In the past, fifth grade bake sales have raised money for school assemblies, books desks, and other educational enrichment, which all classes can enjoy.

Question: what do you do when one of your employees shows up drunk and ruins the bar mitzvah for a family renting your facility?

Apologize? Offer a refund? Hah!

No, you accuse them of not being Jewish!

The full story is here.

The janitor, who was in charge of the cultural centre in the West Island community of Pierrefonds, was drunk when the 350 guests arrived for the Neumann bar mitzvah, court heard.

The Neumanns said they asked the city for an apology. Instead, they got a 40-page defence statement that, among other things, accused them of lying about being Jewish.

At least a couple of people really should be fired for this, not for their complete and utter lack of customer service, but because of their complete and utter lack of intelligence.

These were delayed because the Mac refused to connect to my Motorola phone for several weeks using Bluetooth.

Why? Who knows. Why does it work now? Who knows.

First up, my pharmacist lacks both grammar and an understanding of how Time works. This sign was posted in their window in early April, pending a move across the street to a newer building.

It gets better though. They finished moving on April 30th, and by noon on May 1st their prime competitor had signs up announcing that they were about to open a new Pharmasave store in the space just vacated by Guardian!

Second, a good example of why junior High School principals should not let students update outdoor signs without supervision.

Then again this school has been short of some letters of the alphabet for several months and has adopted the time honoured practice of turning similar shaped letters upside down as a replacement.

The graffiti in this neighbourhood has more respect for the English language than this school does. It is nice that they presented a production of a Dickens classic though.

Third, a look at La Belle Province. In Anglo Canada cheese is marketing via an annoying campaign which hinges on one concept: if you cook with cheese people that you dislike will never go away.

Hmmm.. they’re telling possible customers to cook lousy food in order to get rid of unwelcome guests. And children. It was the ad that suggested cooking lousy food as a way of forcing your offspring to move out of the house that shut down the ad campaign.

And what sort of exotica did our Anglophone audiences learn of that would make their cuisine irresistible? Cheddar and Gouda!

Wow, what risk takers…

In Montreal on the other hand there are series of transit ads also promoting cheese consumption. Gouda? Cheddar? Hah!

How about Pied-de-Vent or a pizza with Migneron de Charlevoix or maybe some Oka? All of which are more or less unknown to Anglo consumers.

Sigh, when it comes to food it seems that our British heritage still holds sway.

Plus, all of the signs that I saw in Quebec were spelled correctly, and many of them even showed some style and elegance.

Social networking sites are the topic of some discussion among journalists these days. One such discussion on the new Canadian Journalism Project site examined Facebook as a journalistic tool, with a comment posted that “I find (Facebook) to be a little more trustworthy, especially since people go by their real names.”

Given that I have one “friend” on Facebook that goes by the name “Anal Medusa”, it’s naïve to think that you’re always seeing people’s real names.

What has fascinated me about this thing – I was dragged into it by my niece and her baby pictures – is that instead of just searching for people’s names you need to figure out what groups or networks they might be part of, or even better that they might have in common with you.

I’ve also been astonished by the number of people who have tracked me down after only a couple of weeks on the service. Facebook really offers a glimpse of the connectedness of people on the ‘net.

From a reporting standpoint Facebook’s strength and weakness is that because members can limit access to their “friends” they will often post things that they might not mention in a “public” forum. (Just look at some of the gems found at Wonkette)

Sometimes a little information is too much, and I often wonder how many employers are looking at social networking sites before hiring new employees.

Regardless, I tend to agree that long held notions of privacy are breaking down rapidly, and that has to change both the type of stories that are written, and the kind of things we read in them.

As a pastime Facebook is fun and only somewhat addictive. It does allow your to stay connected with a wide circle of friends without too much effort – although is that a good thing?

This was entirely new to me, but apparently is actually part of RFC 822 – STANDARD FOR THE FORMAT OF ARPA INTERNET TEXT MESSAGES.

If you’re like me you have used the bcc line of an e-mail to send messages to largish groups. By putting people’s addresses in the bcc line you hide everyone else’s address except the person who receives it.

Lo and behold, there’s an offically sanctioned way to achieve the same thing without using the bcc line.

The correct way to suppress addresses in a group e-mail is format the To: line like this: one-word name of group, colon, addresses separated by commas with no extraneous spaces, semicolon.

Or like this:

squirrelgroup:bob@foobar.com,sid@funbar.net,jane@finbar.org;

Not the final semi-colon – that’s essential. Here’s what it looks like in my e-mail program.

When the message arrives it will have a To: field that reads “squirrelgroup.”

Cool stuff.

Lord I need to stop watching late night television infomercials. Especially the ones that you assume are Saturday Night Live parodies.

Context: I studied yoga for several years, both as a fitness regime, and as a spiritual grounding. I also believe that ballet is a beautiful and special art form. In fact, they have a lot in common, with both requiring grace, commitment, practice, and and a strong belief that one’s body is a temple.

So you can understand my reaction to the latest fitness scam being advertised on television.

YOGA BOOTY BALLET*

This has nothing to do with yoga, nothing to do with ballet, and I seriously doubt that it will shrink your booty.

It’s wrong, just wrong. A $190 value for only two payments of $19.95 (plus $12.95 S&H).

*Yoga Booty Ballet is a registered trademark of Goddess in Training, Inc.

A handful of people in this country may need to know that the CBC Online Store has been under attack because the chapeau pictured at left was referred to as “Castro” hat.

I somehow found this out because I somehow wandered into the somehow officially sanctioned InsideCBC.com blog run by Tod Maffin.

Todd though has outdone himself with followup post which alleges that the CBC shop now also offers: “oregano”, hemp wristbands, and kumbaya drums.

You really do need to see it to believe it. Brilliant.