Gifted Typist

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
Now we finally have a glimpse of the hateful, spiteful, hidden agenda so many of us feared.
After cleverly hiding his NeoCon ideology from centrist Canadians, Stephen Harper finally blew the lid of the thing this week. And it’s ugly.
He plunged the ideological dagger the backs of […]

Did any other Canadians have trouble sorting out the red/blue colour coding in the US election coverage?
In Canada red is the colour of the more progressive Liberal party. Blue is the colour of the more conservative Conservative party.
In the US those colours are opposite with red representing the conservative Republicans and blue the progressive Democrats.
I […]

Such good news.
For so many different reasons.
Congratulations everyone.
This is a very good moment.

With just days left in the US election, I’m nervous. I can’t fathom a world lead by McCain and the cartoon-character, moose-hunting, loose-canon, hockey-mom from Wasilla, Alaska. No offense to loose canons.
I’m liking Barack Obama’s chances and everything seems to be going well for his campaign.
But the Republicans shouldn’t be underestimated. They’re trying every dirty […]

The NeoCons won in Canada last night - but they only won a minority.
More than anything, NeoCon Harper wanted his majority so he could let his NeoCon pit bulls out of the pen and push his NeoCon agenda down the throat of Canada.
But he didn’t get his majority, did he? And he wanted that majority. […]

Today is election day here.
Polls have indicated that Canadians are seriously flirting with the idea of giving a majority to the NeoCons who take their inspiration from their US NeoCon brethren - Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, Kristol, etc.
The NeoCon leader Stephen Harper has done an admirable job of keeping a lid on the socially conservative […]

This is debate night.
In Canada we have The Debates, Part II, in English with all five federal leaders.
In the States, we have the VP debates: Palin vs Biden.
Normally the media likes a tired, cliched boxing metaphor to describe these events
In the US debate this may work: (think Rocky theme)
“Ding! And they’re in the ring! And […]

See my Herald column here.
The USA has Sarah Palin. They also have Obama. Rock and roll candidates, in other words.
Canada on the other hand (yes there is a federal election here too!) has the Canadian charisma triplets - Curly Harper, Larry Dion and Moe Layton.
Canadian elections are boring. Canadian politicians lack charisma. Their groomers file […]

Elections are supposed to be an exercise in the will of the people.
But in Canada, elections are apparently an exercise in the will of the politicians and Big Media.
In poll after poll, the people of Canada have said that the environment is a top priority, yet the pro-environment Green Party has been refused a place […]

We ate by candlelight last night, joining in with the millions who participated in Earth Hour. The little typists were keen, possessed with a sense of urgency. “We have to do this for the environment!”
I was glad to see their energy. I’ve been hanging out clothes, turning down the heat, flicking off lights, buying energy-efficient […]

Until today, my city was a two-newspaper town.
There was the broadsheet The Chronicle Herald and the tabloid Daily News.
The Daily News was the little indie upstart that thought it could. It was young and hungry thirty years ago when it first started as a community paper. As it grew, it set its sights on challenging […]

After the whirl on the London Eye, my little family of typists took a walk along the Thames River on the shortest day of the year.
By mid afternoon the air was darkening and the sky began to ripen into a rich crimson that cast a reddish glow over everything and turned objects into silhouettes.
The large […]

I keep hearing the word “community” being used in new and creative ways. We have the “international community” reacting to the crackdown in Burma. We have the “gaming community” embracing Halo3. And last week I heard a reference to the “Halo3 community.”
I’m not sure what the Halo3 community was doing but I’d hazard a guess […]

The ad asks: How many Nova Scotians does it take to change a lightbulb.
The ad answers: One.
But that’s not quite the case, is it? The ad is sponsored by the government-funded Conserve Nova Scotia. CNS employs Heather Foley Melvin ($100,000+ per year) who got the job with no competition because she used to work for […]

While Harpo worries about a counter- insurgency in Afghanistan, he may wake up to another counter-insurgency in his own back yard. Aboriginal leaders are warning of a summer of protests and blockades as the result of Harpo’s refusal to negotiate land claims with aboriginal peoples. A YouTube video describes how copper wire can be used […]