interpellate

Twentieth Century Fox seems to be jealously guarding this clip, as they keep pulling it off YouTube.  That being said, if they can manage to keep Joss Whedon’s new series, Dollhouse, alive for more than half a season, I will forgive them.  However, I will never forgive them for what they did to Firefly.

You can watch the trailer here.  I know you want to.

Teen melodrama meets vampire flick? Hell yeah!

I hate Calgary.  I’m moving to Berlin!

On May 1st Statistics Canada will release yet another analysis of the 2006 Census data, this one drawing firm connections between the increasing income disparity in this country, the devaluation of educated and immigrant workers in the labor market and the outrageous costs of housing in this country.

The final 2006 census data will portray the richest 5 per cent of Canadians as dramatically accumulating more wealth, the incomes of most residents showing perhaps the greatest stagnancy in the developed world and the nation’s poorest falling further and further behind.

Immigrants and Canada’s native-born youngest male adults will be identified as the prime victims of a 25-year trend in widening income inequality – an inequality some economists believe reflects systemic long-term changes to the labour market rather than transitional bumps in demographics and swings in the business cycle…

The census numbers are expected to show that the rich are driving up shelter prices beyond reach of increasing numbers of people whose earnings are inert, a situation impacting heavily on immigrants arriving in major cities where the housing markets are already stressed.

All this rosy news apparently spells doom for me and my future (which perhaps makes my musings about a possible career change this weekend especially fun!). Oh, and in other news on the “Ed Stelmach is a liar” front: experts (i.e. people with training in economics, not people who come into Pier 1 and proclaim that it doesn’t make sense that Canadian and US prices are different when our dollars are at par) are already claiming that the increasingly unattainable costs of shelter will ultimately lead to the ruination of our economy:

Accommodation is the biggest bite out of the basket, and it goes straight to the heart of how income inequality is not about poverty, it’s about affordability.

And affordability is key. You know our macro-economic policy . . . the portion of the population that consumes the most is lower income people who don’t save, they spend. Anyone in the bottom half is spending more of their income than they’re saving. You want to keep them spending. So don’t keep chewing up their disposable income with housing costs, which is what growing inequality does. It just grinds down the wheels of commerce.

One of the best albums of last year, in my opinion, was the cacophonous and difficult Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters by Scotland’s The Twilight Sad.

This year, if I haven’t already ranted to you about it, the front-runner for my favorite album of the year is The Midnight Organ Fight another Scottish band: Frightened Rabbit. More accessible but just as affecting, I have been listening to this collection of well-written songs about love and sex and drinking more or less non-stop since it was released a few back. You probably should be doing the same.

As the premier of Alberta prepared to launch his massive, $5-million global “re-branding” campaign of misinformation about the environmental impact of the oil sands last night, Greenpeace successfully upstaged him by dropping from the ceiling with a large banner that read: “Stelmach, the best premier oil money can buy.  Stop the tarsands!”

But Mr. Stelmach says he’s not surprised that the protesters interrupted his speech, especially after banner-waving Greenpeace activists dogged him throughout the recent Alberta election campaign.

“You’ve got to be prepared for that kind of behaviour,” he later told reporters. “And that’s why in my speech, I talked about getting the message to other jurisdictions around the world.”

“We’re certainly not going to leave it to Greenpeace or the Sierra Club, because at the end of the day they’re not accountable to anybody.”

In the end, he’s right.  In being accountable to the oil companies that own this province and its government, Stelmach’s hands are tied: he must lie, he must lie repeatedly to people all over the world, and he must lie while spend millions of tax payer dollars to do so.  Thankfully, Greenpeace is not accountable to these corporations, and so they are free to tell the truth.

It has recently been pointed out to me that if there’s one thing that the US military knows how to do, it’s raping women. Not only has the rape of Iraqi women been ubiquitous and almost entirely unpunished, but apparently male American soldiers routinely and gleefully rape their female counterparts without consequence (for the men, I mean). Since the US is all about equality, this article has thankfully pointed out that not only do American troops rape declared enemies and each other, they also rape American allies:

US military prosecutors in Japan have charged a US marine [Staff Sergeant Tyrone Hadnott] with the rape of a 14-year-old Japanese girl on the island of Okinawa…

Lieutenant General Edward Rice, the recently-appointed commander of US troops in Japan, demanded high standards of behaviour following the high-profile allegations against US servicemen, including the rapes and murder.

Last month a US sailor was indicted in the stabbing death of a taxi driver near the US naval base in Yokosuka, south of Tokyo. Four other marines from a base in southwest Japan also face court-martial over the rape of a Japanese woman last year.

How much you want to bet that the charges laid against Hadnott (or any of the other men) don’t stick? American officials have already issued a statement proclaiming that these are merely accusations, and that a trial will be required before his guilt can be determined. Too bad all the women around the world who have been raped by American soldiers didn’t have the benefit of a hearing before they were punished.

For those of you who remember my aborted dissertation topic, you know that I just can’t resist a story about corpses and spectacle. This article would have made excellent fodder for my analysis:

Some 15,000 worshippers gathered yesterday at the shrine of the Roman Catholic saint and mystic Padre Pio, as his exhumed body went on display for the first time since his death almost 40 years ago.

More than a million people are expected to file past a transparent casket holding his restored corpse between now and September 2009. Catholic practice allows for the remains of saints to be exhumed, checked for their state of deterioration and exhibited as relics for veneration.

Like I always say: “if you’re going to follow a religion, let it be decadent and grotesque.” Actually, I guess I always say “decadent and corrupt,” but I’m officially adding “grotesque” to the mix.