Radio Diatribe

Remember The New Republic? The (formerly) left-of-centre, Washington, D.C.-based magazine that used to be the most relevant forum for American liberal ideas in early to mid-90’s until it got totally fucked over by that motherfucker Stephen Glass in 1998? The magazine whose hiring Bareback Andy as its editor (pre-Stephen Glass debacle, of course) shot him to his current level of fame? The magazine whose current irrational support of any action that would end up fucking over Muslims in the Middle East (read “Zionist agenda”) that continues to rapidly erode the little relevance it has left after pretty much everyone stopped reading it in 1998?

Well, The New Republic is about to become even less relevant (as if that was even possible) thanks to its new owner: CanWest Global Communications Corporation. Can-fucking-West. If you didn’t know already, the Asper family, which controls CanWest, are fucking bat-shit crazy conservative Zionists. And, they like to use their media holdings to present their insane perception of the world as “reality.” Just watch Global National on the day something happens in Israel if you are not convinced.

Obviously, it is in the Aspers’ personal interests to prop up a dying Zionist rag, especially the one based out of Washington, D.C. But, this exercise in throwing shovels of cash into a bottomless well, an arrangement strikingly resemblant to the one between the Moonies and The Washington Times/UPI, is definitely not in the interest of the parties who actually own CanWest, which are not the Aspers¹. And, guess what? If you’re Canadian, every time you watch Family Guy (which is syndicated on GlobalTV), The New Republic is going to get a penny.

1. The Asper family has a majority of votes in CanWest Global despite having a minority stake in the company thanks to the company’s multi-class share system. Most of the shares owned by the Aspers belong to the class that grants multiple votes to each share while shares issued to non-Aspers have one vote each or none at all. To be fair, it’s not just CanWest that has this multi-class system. Rogers, Shaw, CHUM (before it was acquired by CTVglobemedia), and The New York Times Co. have (or, in case of CHUM, had) multi-class system, granting founding families with minority interests in the companies the majority of votes. It should however be noted that the families that control Rogers, Shaw, and NYT are not insane.

• Paxil gives you sweaty palms and makes you sleep way more than you used to.
• A certain Mr. Sean Lynch is in my CS 350 class and has a deep baritone voice (I saw him multiple times before, but I’ve never heard him speak).
• The volume control on the new Air Canada video-on-demand system doesn’t work. The VOD system did have one good movie (Transamerica, to be specific) on it though.
• Nagi Noda is the new Michel Gondry. (proof 1, proof 2)
• Reactine works way better than Allegra for my birch pollen allergy.
• Benzedrine really doesn’t help you study, or so I’ve been told.

Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton of Arab Strap are both 32 years old, and this picture is from at least three years ago, which means they would have been at most 29 when this picture was taken.

Peaches (a.k.a. Merrill Nisker) is 38.

What I am trying to say: Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton look way older than they are actually; Peaches looks much younger. Peaches wins?

The housing mapper has been refreshed.

Features include:

• NEW - Google Maps instead of the slow, Flash-based Yahoo! Maps
• NEW - Faster housing retrieval, hopefully.
• Uses the current (almost; if someone made the same query less than four hours before, you will get the cached version) listing, not a cached version from a long, long time ago.
• Less self-promotion-laden than the version by that another guy, not that there’s anything wrong with self-promotion.

I guess it’s really true: everyone has a blog.

This guy was in some math class (can’t remember which one), this guy was in my CS 246 lecture section, and this guy was in that horrible combinatorics class. And, I am pretty sure I saw him on Columbia St. a few days ago; I don’t think he was in any of my classes though.

O-em-gee, indeed.

From “B.C. Case May Change Politics Forever,” an editorial by Stephen Harper published in The Toronto Sun on April 8, 2000:

It seems like a thousand years ago that I went to Ottawa to assist Deborah Grey, Reform’s first and then only MP.

No sooner had Deborah and I arrived in Ottawa than I became aware of three political lies circulating on Parliament Hill. The first was that Deborah was homosexual. The second was that I was homosexual. And the third was that we were sleeping together!

Wait, it gets even better:

Anyone who gets involved in the process will quickly come to realize that lying and politics go together like scandalous dresses and Oscar night.

Scandalous dresses? Oscar night? I mean, what the fuck? Did Harper just out himself?

And, uhh, can somebody elaborate on these rumours?

I am going back home tomorrow on Air Canada flights AC103 and AC286. Anyone on the same plane?

So why do people care if Sufjan Stevens is gay? I thought about this for a while and realized that this is a really stupid question; when people wonder if someone’s gay, it’s always because that someone is:

1. famous,
2. a personal acquintance,
3. a musician, or
4. pretty.

Sufjan qualifies for criteria 1 (although barely), 3, and 4; so naturally, there has to be people out there wondering if he’s gay or not.

Apparently, a lot of people do. According to Measure Map and Google Analytics, approximately half of visitors get here by searching some variation of “sufjan stevens gay.”

This got me wondering: why do people care if Sufjan Stevens is gay, why would they wonder if he is gay in the first place, and why do they come here?

The third one is obvious:

1. This blog is third one down from the top for “sufjan stevens gay” on Google.
2. The first two are completely spurrious hits.
3. NNDB, the most comprehensive “gay or not” database, does not have an entry for Sufjan Stevens.

I’ll try to tackle the first question, why do people care if Sufjan Stevens is gay, in the next entry.