The McWetlog

Beard or no beard?

Jonathan Crowe — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 10:32:49 -0500

I shaved my beard off for Halloween; it was the first time in seven years that I’d gone beardless. Those who’d never seen me without one — Jennifer, for example — were kind of shocked. So was I: the last time I was clean-shaven, I was about 50 pounds lighter. After I posted a photo to my Facebook profile. friends began calling for me to lose the beard for good. Of course, I’d already begun growing it back: the beard makes me look a little less round-faced (two words: “Commander Riker”) and, well, shaving makes me bleed.

So, compare and contrast: above left, me immediately after I shaved the beard off; above right, me and my beard, two weeks later. (Both immediately after the shower, so my hair is wet and scruffy.) So, what do you think? Beard or no beard?

On LiveJournal

Jonathan Crowe — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:15:05 -0500

So help me, I actually have a LiveJournal account — not so much for posting entries there, because, you know, I already have a blog or six, but to read and comment on friends’ journals there. If you’re on LiveJournal and I find you — I’m very sneaky that way — you will probably get a friend request from me. Feel free to send me one yourself.

Beethoven interpretations

Jonathan Crowe — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 08:42:31 -0500

Paul Wells lists and ranks a half-dozen boxed sets of the Beethoven symphonies, which brings up a point that I’ve only recently figured out: it is not only permissible to have more than one recording of a work of classical music, it can also be desirable to listen to different interpretations of the same work.

The more I learn about classical music, the more I realize how much this is true. I recently picked up a 10-disc boxed set of the Beethoven piano sonatas performed by Vladimir Ashkenazy; at less than $40, it’s hella cheap, like the Zinman Beethoven symphonies that Wells touts. I’d previously been collecting the John O’Conor performances on Telarc, but they’re now hard to find and I can’t complete the set. Which is a pity: O’Conor appears to be a Beethoven specialist, whereas many other performers recording the sonatas seem to be Romantic specalists like Ashkenazy for whom Beethoven is not the primary focus of their careers.

On balance, I think I prefer O’Conor’s interpretation to Ashkenazy’s. O’Conor is crisper and faster: for example, he plays the second movement of Opus 28 (Piano Sonata No. 15 in D major) in 5:47, whereas Ashkenazy takes more than eight languourous minutes. It’s not consistent: sometimes O’Conor is legato where Ashkenazy is staccato; sometimes it’s vice versa. These are, of course, interpretations: they’re making decisions about how to play these pieces. As I learn more about the sonatas (which, by the way, are my passion and my life and my favouritest music ever), as I pore over the scores and read books like Charles Rosen’s (Amazon.com, Amazon.ca), I notice where those decisions are being made. I hope that at some point I’ll have learned enough to understand why they’re being made.

In the meantime, though, I’m giving myself permission to buy more music.

The family business

Jonathan Crowe — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 20:03:40 -0500

Justin Trudeau gets a lot of flack for being his father’s son. He’s accused of having a former prime minister as his father as the only thing on his résumé. But he’s far from the only scion of a politician who’s been elected to the House of Commons. Consider that Niki Ashton, Maxime Bernier, Paul Dewar, Jack Layton, Dominic LeBlanc, Peter MacKay, David McGuinty, Geoff Regan and Michael Savage, all elected or re-elected on Tuesday, are all the children of former members of parliament or a provincial legislature, cabinet ministers, party leaders or provincial premiers.

To say nothing, in past parliaments, of people like Preston Manning, Paul Martin, Jane Stewart, Susan Whelan or many, many more. Or of senators like Sharon Carstairs. Or of the spouses of politicians or former politicians who were also elected on Tuesday: Dona Cadman, Olivia Chow, Nina Grewal, Jack Layton. Or the siblings-of, such as the McGuintys or the Petersons.

As I’ve noted before, politics is a family business like any other; don’t single out Justin for doing what so many others also do.

(Compare this to the U.S., where virtually every successful presidential candidate for the last couple of decades has had some significant daddy issues of one sort or another, a trend neither current candidate will change.)

The Citizen endorses Cannon

Jonathan Crowe — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 08:12:36 -0500

The Ottawa Citizen’s editorial board endorses Lawrence Cannon for re-election in the Pontiac riding, mostly because of “experience and influence” — i.e., he’s a cabinet minister with a strong C.V. But that’s not to disparage the competition: “All in all, a good slate of candidates,” says the Citizen, who had something nice to say about each one. Truth be told, it’s becoming very hard to figure out who to vote for, simply because there’s no obvious asshat among the candidates this time, just different people with different strengths, weaknesses and policy positions. This is a good problem to have.

MESSENGER swings by Mercury again

Jonathan Crowe — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 07:13:05 -0500

Images are now available from the MESSENGER probe’s second fly-by of Mercury. This image “is one of the first to be returned and shows a WAC image of the departing planet taken about 90 minutes after the spacecraft’s closest approach to Mercury. The bright crater just south of the center of the image is Kuiper, identified on images from the Mariner 10 mission in the 1970s. For most of the terrain east of Kuiper, toward the limb (edge) of the planet, the departing images are the first spacecraft views of that portion of Mercury’s surface.”

(Photo credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington.)

Previously: MESSENGER images!

Zoe's Tale

Jonathan Crowe — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 10:32:13 -0500

John Scalzi’s aliens are sparsely described and unconvincingly Other (he’s no Larry Niven) and his characters are usually some variation on smartass. But his novels, with exciting plots and witty dialogue (see “some variation on smartass,” above), never fail to entertain. So it is with Zoe’s Tale, which is a retelling of the story of The Last Colony (which missed winning this year’s Hugo Award for Best Novel by a whisker) from the point of view of the protagonists’ adopted daughter, Zoë. (Why she loses the umlaut in the book’s title, I have no idea.)

The Last Colony suffered from a couple of plot holes (viz., where did those werewolves go, and how did Zoë get that deus-ex-machina technology?) that Zoe’s Tale fills fulsomely. In fact, it’s impossible to consider Zoe’s Tale absent The Last Colony: it’s very much a mirror image of that novel. The two novels are both case studies in limited first-person narration: neither John Perry, the protagonist of The Last Colony and Zoë’s stepfather, nor Zoë herself in Zoe’s Tale, knows exactly what the other is doing; essentially, these are two books trying to tell the same story. Two blind grabs at the same elephant. The end result is that Zoe’s Tale deals in detail with what The Last Colony mentioned in passing; unfortunately, the converse is also true: the grand plot of The Last Colony is given short shrift in Zoe’s Tale — key points are mentioned briefly, plot twists are telegraphed — and I’m not sure if Zoe’s Tale stands alone as a result.

The tension between the novel’s two ambitions — a retelling of the events of The Last Colony from Zoë’s perspective, and an attempt to explore Zoë’s tragic background and her role as an object of veneration for an entire alien species — is sometimes strained, and I think the latter suffers a little bit at the expense of the former. Despite Scalzi’s breezy and accessible prose and the book’s positioning as a young-adult novel, Zoe’s Tale is an ambitious book. Despite its flaws, it mostly succeeds, in that it’s got lots of good bits in it and is fun to read. Which, in the end, is really what matters, don’t you think?

Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi: Amazon.ca • Amazon.com

Marsbound

Jonathan Crowe — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 10:23:41 -0500

Marsbound, Joe Haldeman’s latest novel, starts slowly and intimately: the first quarter of the novel is spent following his young protagonist, Carmen Dula, and her family on a weeks-long trip up a space elevator and thence on their journey to Mars. The second quarter unfolds like a Heinlein juvenile (except for the sex), with Carmen’s struggle to survive on Mars personified by a stern and bureaucratic authority figure with whom she comes into conflict. Once Carmen runs away and stumbles upon a colony of Martians, however, the similarities to, say, Red Planet end. The novel pivots, draws back in scope and dramatically accelerates its pace; years fly by in the same number of pages that described hours, as Carmen returns to Earth orbit with a posse of Martians — who turn out not to be indigenous to Mars and unsure of their own origins — as they try to figure out where they come from. Marsbound finishes as another iteration on a common Haldeman theme: human beings facing the judgment of overwhelmingly powerful aliens. The Martians and other aliens are wonderfully imagined in this otherwise spare novel, whose two halves never quite fuse into a satisfactory whole.

Marsbound by Joe Haldeman: Amazon.ca • Amazon.com

Recession, commodities and the oil sands

Jonathan Crowe — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 10:18:52 -0500

Maybe you thought the Canadian economy was relatively shielded from the panic and nonsense going on in the U.S. right now, because our financial services sector and our mortgage lending policies weren’t quite as batshit insane as they have been south of the border. If you did, you thought wrong: the commodities sector — stuff like mining, oil and other natural resources, i.e., the backbone of the Canadian economy — took a shellacking on the markets Thursday on fears that an economic downturn would dry up demand. Even oil prices could be affected: one analyst thinks that the price of oil could drop below US$50 a barrel. (It’s still above US$90 now.)

Now that’s interesting, because, according to the Wikipedia article on the Athabasca oil sands, it costs between $36 and $40, Canadian, to turn bitumen into a barrel of synthetic crude. Profits at US$50 a barrel would be something on the order of 16 to 27 percent. At some point near or below US$50 a barrel, oil sands production would cease to be profitable. And then things would get very interesting in Alberta.

So what was that about the fundamentals of the Canadian economy again?

Number-crunching the Pontiac vote

Jonathan Crowe — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 18:52:58 -0500

My high-risk election prognostication continues. In this entry, I’m going to take a look at the results for the 2006 election in my riding, Pontiac (see previous entry), and in particular in my particular corner of the riding, Pontiac County (i.e., the Regional County Municipality of Pontiac, or Pontiac MRC),

The Pontiac riding went Conservative in 2006 by a 2,371-vote margin, or 4.97 percentage points. But were it not for the Pontiac MRC, it would have gone to the Bloc Québécois by about 700 votes. The Bloc’s Christine Émond Lapointe led in L’Ange-Gardien, Buckingham, Cantley, Masson-Angers and Val-des-Monts by varying degrees; she even narrowly won Maniwaki, the home town of David Smith, the incumbent Liberal M.P. The Conservative candidate, Lawrence Cannon, won the Municipality of Pontiac (which, confusingly, is outside the Pontiac MRC), and Chelsea in addition to the Pontiac MRC, but it was the Pontiac MRC that put him over the top.

Candidate	Pontiac MRC	Entire Riding
Brault, Céline (NDP)	512 (8.08%)	4,759 (9.97%)
Cannon, Lawrence (Conservative)	3,490 (55.06%)	16,069 (33.68%)
Émond Lapointe, Christine (BQ)	424 (6.69%)	13,698 (28.71%)
Garahan, Moe (Green)	90 (1.42%)	1,512 (3.16%)
Legros, Benoît (Marxist-Leninist)	17 (0.27%)	107 (0.22%)
Smith, David (Liberal)	1,785 (28.16%)	11,561 (24.23%)
Total vote (voter turnout %)	6,339 (54.00%)	48,033 (61.76%)

In the 2004 election, which David Smith won, the Liberal and Conservative candidates were stronger in different parts of the Pontiac MRC. Smith was dominant in the upper Pontiac and Fort Coulonge; the Conservative, Judy Grant, did very well in and around Shawville, with the narrow belt of municipalities between Fort Coulonge and Shawville — a line following Route 301 I like to refer to as the “Litchfield corridor” — falling somewhere in the middle.

The 2006 election saw the same tendencies, in that Smith did better in the upper Pontiac and Fort Coulonge and Cannon did better around Shawville — even so, Cannon annihilated Smith virtually everywhere, winning the upper Pontiac municipalities 47 to 39, Fort Coulonge and Mansfield 42 to 34, and the Litchfield corridor 56 to 27. In and around Shawville, I think his margin was actually worse than Judy Grant’s, but he still clobbered Smith 68 to 19. (And if you think Smith’s results look bad, consider that he did better here than in the rest of the riding.)

As usual, the Bloc was hardly anywhere to be seen in this most federalist of Quebec counties. Émond Lapointe finished behind the NDP’s Céline Brault in the county as a whole. However, while NDP support was small and evenly distributed, Bloc support was more concentrated: 13 percent in and around Fort Coulonge, nearly 19 percent in Île-du-Grand-Calumet, and 20 percent in Rapides-des-Joachims. These are historically the pockets in which the Bloc’s limited support is found in my area; not coincidentally, they’re also the most francophone areas of the county.

What does this mean for the 2008 election?

Cannon has the advantage of incumbency (and a cabinet post), but he doesn’t have much room left to grow in this part of the riding. But he has abundant opportunities for growth at the Bloc’s expense elsewhere. If the Bloc performs poorly this time around, I expect that Cannon will have a relatively easy time retaining his seat.

Support for the Liberal candidate, Cindy Duncan McMillan (see previous entry), is hard to gauge; absent a strong Conservative candidate, she’d have strong appeal out here, as a farmer whose platform is very much focused on local and rural issues. But the sort of people her platform would appeal to are exactly the sort of people who overwhelmingly voted for Cannon the last time. And I can’t see her playing well in the Gatineau suburbs. I expect her to do better in the Pontiac MRC than David Smith did, but not necessarily by much; I don’t know how she’ll do elsewhere. I don’t expect her to win, honestly.

But who I expect to win is not necessarily who I end up voting for. And it’s worth pointing out that the margins were tight enough last time that any significant movement in any direction by any party could very well change the outcome this time.

Surrounded by frickin' idiots

Jonathan Crowe — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 18:35:48 -0500

My brother complained that my last post about Stephen Harper was just a little too fellatial, so it seems to me that I should say a bit more about the federal election.

(This is not without risk, given that I’m working on a government contract at the moment, and in the future there is always the possibility that I will be writing letters and briefing notes for a politician I take cheap shots at, but I think I’ll be okay; it’s not like anyone reads this thing anyway.)

The bottom line is that, despite my sordid partisan past, I’m politically neutral and have been for a decade. I’ve voted for each the three major federal parties at least once in past elections. And while the likelihood of my voting for the Bloc is less than zero, any of the remaining four parties (including the Greens) could, theoretically, win my vote. Though the course of the campaign may narrow my options, I generally try to vote for the best local candidate, on the basis that I’d rather have a competent, hard-working representative I don’t agree with than a meathead who’s barely capable of regurgitating slogans I do happen to agree with.

Now that that’s out of the way, let me say something about the Conservatives. Harper is widely considered a control freak; the emerging wag’s consensus is that that’s because he has no choice: in Dr. Evil’s words, he’s surrounded by frickin’ idiots.

Nowhere else is that more clear than in my own riding, where his Quebec lieutenant, transport minister Lawrence Cannon, is running for re-election. Now, I voted for Cannon last time — my anti-Conservative family members just had an infarction — in no small part to displace the incumbent Liberal M.P., a mediocrity with whom I was thoroughly unimpressed. (Bring back Robert Bertrand!) But since then, like his boss, he’s had some, um, staffing issues. Darlene Lannigan’s patronizing remarks to Aboriginal constituents were clueless enough to warrant Cannon canning her, at least in the opinion of his opponents, but she’s staying on.

It might well be that cluelessness in Cannon’s office is a relative concept. For one thing, his staff seems to have language issues — problematic in a riding that is 23 percent anglophone. When I wrote to natural resources minister Gary Lunn about his department’s decision to stop producing paper topographic maps (a decision Lunn later overturned), I copied Cannon as my M.P. His office sent me an acknowledgement, in English; to call it barely literate would be charitable. And last week, his campaign office called us, in French, asking for our support. Here’s a tip: if you’re going to canvass Shawville, a town that is 93 percent English, has no Catholic church and still worships the memory of John George Diefenbaker (In Quebec. In our province. I am not making this up.), you’ll probably want your anglophone volunteers on this particular job. Given the 80-percent-plus support the Conservatives get in Shawville and Clarendon, it shouldn’t be too hard to find one. (You can’t make Mayfred do all of it.) Very curious.

Harper and the arts

Jonathan Crowe — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 14:40:55 -0500

A curious Globe and Mail interview with Stephen Harper reveals his artistic side, presumably in an attempt to put paid to the notion that he’s a cultural Philistine bent on killing all government funding to the arts. It turns out that he has been a pretty serious piano player, on and off, even getting his Royal Conservatory Grade 9 (which is more or less where I’m at, informally).

For most of his adult life, he didn’t own a piano and rarely played, leaving him “a shadow of my former self.” But since moving to 24 Sussex Dr., which boasts an impressive instrument, he has taken it up once more. …

“I’ve always been torn on music and piano in a way because I actually get a great deal of satisfaction out of when I do it, but I get so wrapped up in it. I’ve always had that problem with the artistic things I’ve enjoyed doing — I’ve played piano, I’ve sung a bit, I used to write poetry — I’ve always found with these kinds of things that they draw me in and I can’t let them go. I find it difficult to do it just on the side, a little bit here and now,” he said.

As someone who’s been into piano pretty seriously, on and off, who went 14 awful years without a piano until I bought a digital earlier this year, yes, this resonates with me. I get what he’s on about.

Which brings us to a more nuanced view of his recent cuts to arts funding, which he defends on the grounds of fiscal discipline and being choosy about which arts programs to increase funding to and which to cut. He attempts a middle ground: “You don’t get to the point where you’re just abandoning it, because I think cultural life is too fragile for that. And on the other hand, you don’t get to the point where, to be blunt, you have creators or producers who are entirely cut off from public need or public demand.”

What Harper is arguing, I think, is that there is a problem if you have art without an audience, and if government funding simply allows art to be produced without any real need to connect with other people. Art is, after all, a form of communication. And I’ve long been leery of government grants, whether artistic or economic, and have demurred when well-meaning local friends have encouraged me to apply for them. I can’t see how it’s worthwhile to produce art that no one wants to consume. The trick is figuring out the threshold: what art is worth funding despite its economic unsustainability. That’s a different argument than a generic hate-on for arts grants, and a trickier thing to accomplish in practice.

Back to the salt mines

Jonathan Crowe — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 14:23:41 -0500

I went back to work this week — a six-week contract editing and writing briefing notes, correspondence and memoranda for Public Works and Government Services Canada.

This wasn’t my original plan, which was to use the fall — or at least September — to get caught up on a number of things that had accumulated during my year-long stint at Health Canada but that couldn’t get finished over the summer. But money’s money, and the gig is a good fit. And since freelancers can’t predict when the next contract will come, back to work I go.

Still, a lot of things left unfinished, including a whole whack of photographs to process, buying new glasses, tons of blogging, a major redesign of Gartersnake.info (which I’ve been ignoring for months even while it’s been drawing thousands of page views a day) and a book version of the garter snake care guide. These will simply have to wait until after this contract is done; that’ll be mid-October unless they extend me, which does tend to happen.

Don LaFontaine: A voice silenced

Jonathan Crowe — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 16:05:50 -0500

Don LaFontaine, the king of movie trailer voiceovers, has died. Here’s a thing about him:

LaFontaine has been absolutely iconic in recent years. See, for example, his self-lampooning GEICO ad.

And he’s by no means alone: Five Guys in a Limo features four other movie trailer voiceover talents. Also, the guy appearing on the Comedian trailer is Hal Douglas, not LaFontaine — but both are know for using the “In a world …” line that has become a shorthand for this kind of thing.

Via Accordion Guy, MetaFilter and Scalzi.

Update: In this Washington Post tribute to LaFontaine, every fucking paragraph begins with “In a world …” Okay, we get it. (Via Kottke.)

A note to NexStar 5 owners

Jonathan Crowe — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 14:48:32 -0500

Third-party accessories may not fit on a Celestron NexStar 5 even if they’re designed to do so. Apparently, some NexStar 5 telescopes are a little thicker around the corrector plate than others are, so even accessories specifically designed for them may not fit if the tolerances are too tight. I found this out in my recent shipment from Kendrick Astro Instruments, which arrived today. Their solar filters and Kwik Focus are designed to cover a telescope’s objective lens or corrector plate, and be tightened with screws. They’re sized to fit based on the telescope tube’s outside diameter (OD). My NexStar 5 SE has an OD of exactly 150 mm, which is on the cusp between two sizes. The smaller one was advertised to fit my telescope, so I ordered it. It doesn’t fit, and according to the Kendricks — who are, incidentally, wonderful to deal with — it should have fit easily. So back it goes, to be replaced by the larger model.