BCL: Aspiring Novelist

 Just a quick life update.  

As some of my readers may know,   I have published short stories here and there over the decades, and have been trying to get a novel into print for some time.  

Earlier this year, a small UK Press called Baynam Books picked up my manuscript for Delicate Creatures, and it is due out in January of next year under my real name, M.J Murphy.

I've been making some efforts at marketing the book, or at getting set to market the book when it appears.  I have a fairly pathetic Instagram page here.  I say pathetic because the last picture I took, by accident, was of my thumb over the camera lens.  I have bit my tongue and paid Elon to get my blue check on Twitter.  After a month of that I am still not popular, so I am assume both Left and Right fear my intellect and have conspired to suppress me.  And my Bluesky profile can be viewed here.

But the thing I am most proud of is my new Substack, called Spoilers Ahead! The Weird Book Blog, which contains a series of short essays on some of the obscure authors I love (think David Lindsay, George Borrow, and so on).  

So far the readership is fairly minimal, and one might perhaps question the wisdom marketing a book by writing about other books nobody has read.  But whatever.

Speaking of Substack, it has its peculiarities.  For example, it is extremely difficult to add one of these:

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... because Substack has no easy method of centering text.  You have to switch to the "poetry" mode and do it by eye.  Also, its metrics don't easily separate visits from unique visits, so most of my traffic is just me checking the site to see how much traffic I'm getting.  Other substackers have noticed this as well.  The "notes" section  is mostly people complaining about lack of visits, so the "network" effects over there are basically zero.

Shocker In T.O!

 Tory, 68, announced the end of his mayoralty, less than four months after he was easily re-elected to a third term

Tory had admitted a “serious error of judgment” by having a relationship with the 31-year-old former staffer

Frankly I have a hard enough time getting my head around the fact that John Tory had sex.  It seems totally out of character.  I always figured when they needed another Tory some fully grown version walked out of a cloning vat somewhere.

Downtown T.O. Is Looking A Bit Scuzzy These Days

 In fact it reminds me of when I 1st came to town in the mid 1980s, except that the porn shops have moved North on Yonge towards Bloor Street, and they're selling DVDs rather than VHS tapes.  And these days they're surrounded by pot shops.  Not upper end boutiques like Spirit Leaf either, more like "all you can huff" places.

And outside a sandwich shop there's a mural that I'm pretty sure is inviting  you to come worship Satan.  The incomplete human figure portrayed in it is definitely sporting horns, but the text around him is written in an ancient script that I fear to utter. 

I don't mind.  In fact it sends me back.  But I'm not  sure the tourists will be impressed.

Accountability/Cancel Culture, and the Possible End of Twitter

So this might be the end of Twitter.  I'm about 1/2 convinced Musk is willing to burn 44 billion  dollars just to drive the thing into the ground, for reasons that I'll give towards the bottom.  And if the platform disintegrates I think  it will be difficult to replace, for reasons I'll also give near the bottom.  But don't skip ahead.  It's all good.

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About 20 years ago Southern Baptists launched a series of letter writing campaigns designed to convince Disney that Disneyland was too gay-friendly and if the company didn't stop supporting same sex marriage they (the Southern Baptists) would boycott the place.  It didn't work.  Not enough Baptists were willing to back up the threats; it turns out they all loved riding The Matterhorn and touring The Haunted Mansion.  And if you have ever been to Disneyland, you know that the young lads they employ there are so fresh-faced and clean-smelling that they're  impossible to hate. So the boycott never caught-on among the broader public, either.

But I'm more interested in the mechanics of the thing,

The Baptists would rent the basement at a local church.  Then 50 or 60 local Baptist kids would be recruited, and there would  be desks made available to them from the on-site Sunday School.  The folks behind the protest would provide a model letter stuck up on a big white-board,  and the kids would be given envelopes, sheets of lined paper, and pencils.  They would be asked to copy the letter, sign it, and stick it in an envelope provided.  Later a stamp would be affixed and the letter mailed.  And Hey Presto! if you repeated this process in enough rented church basements with enough kids then  maybe Disney would think they were facing a back-lash over their too-gay-friendly, anti-family  policies.  Again, it was  not very effective.  For example, if there was a grammatical/spelling error in the model, it wound-up in all the kid's letters.  The folks at Disney weren't stupid; they recognized AstroTurf.

But the more important thing: there was a monetary cost to every step in this process, that increased in a linear fashion for each protest letter generated.  Paper cost money.  Pencils cost money  Envelopes cost money.  U.S. Stamps back then cost around 25 cents apiece.  Renting church basements cost money, although maybe the Southern Baptist Church defrayed this expense. You had to buy the kids a box of juice to keep them hydrated...

The moral: pre-Internet, there were costs to mounting a consumer boycott that simply do not exist anymore

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Because slowly email became the dominant form of communication, and the material expenses related producing a piece of written material fell to zero. You could also organize via email, and ditch costs associated with congregating at a physical location.   In a few ways, though, the mechanics of protest were unchanged.  Someone might provide a  template letter, and you might be  invited to  personalize the letter you eventually emailed to the people you were trying to reach.  

A much better climate for protest, but hardly perfect.  Within a particular company there was always someone who read these letters.  If they thought it warranted, they would pass news of your campaign  up the Chain of Command.  Eventually someone important in the company might conclude that your concerns were valid, or that your boycott might be successful and cost the company money.  So a change in the corporate direction might be made. 

 More often they would just hit the delete button.  All your work would disappear into the ether, and nobody would be any wiser.  

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But then  Twitter  came along.  Like e-mail it allowed you to write (tiny little) letters and encourage other people to do likewise, and all for free.  In your letters you could bitch about some product and send your concerns to the company making the product, and so could your followers.  And by product I  mean things like Ye or Joe Rogan or Kyrie Irving.  

But  here's the key difference between a twitter vs. email campaign: your complaints were no longer made in a vacuum, but before a huge audience of media types, who for whatever historical reasons have chosen to colonize Twitter and make it their social media platform of choice. It's not just the company that saw your efforts, it was a bunch of people paid to ask questions like: what are you going to do about all those complaints, Disney?  It is far more difficult  to bin a twitter swarm than it is a pile of neatly written letters or an inbox full of emails.

What I think you wind up with is the world's most effective means of organizing a very specific kind of protest. And this tool has been adopted with a vengeance; it's behind what we call Accountability Culture, or Cancel Culture if you don't  approve of it.

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So what about Conservative complaints re a bias?  Isn't Twitter just a tool of The Left being used to oppress the Right? Well, sort of.   The typical twitter protest flags  online assholishness, and the Right provides an incredibly target rich environment for this kind of  thing.    I mean, Liberals can be irritating pricks, and some are true monsters, but they usually hide it under a veneer of polite behavior.  Like my mom used to tell me: the least you could do is try and act normal.  

And of course Conservatives use Twitter and other social media to exactly the same purposes.  Ask James Gunn.  They just don't have as much fun with it because The Left is better at keeping its pathologies under wraps. 

And the thing is, cancelling J.K. Rowling or Dave Chappelle or whoever is a business decision on the part of the people who employ or sponsor these people.  Twitter is just a bunch of words the business may or may not find compelling, based on how damaging the threat of a product boycott promised by the words seems to be.  Nobody cares about your outrage unless you have money.  You notice Adidas didn't abandon Ye  right away: the Calculation was "Sure he hates Jews, but how many sneakers is he selling to other people?"  Only when the calculation went negative was Ye fired out the door.  Netflex never dumped Chappelle; his trans-bashing comedy brought eye-balls to the service, and apparently still sells out arenas. 

So consumer boycotts don't always work, even when they use Twitter.  Sometimes they shouldn't work.  Sometimes the company is right to stick with their man or woman.  They just work better than they used to, and better then they would without the platform.

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Assuming you the reader buys all this, is it worthwhile for Elon Musk to pay 44 billion so he can, basically, crash the car he just bought?   It might be; he's now officially a figure in the Alt-Right, and Twitter has been used very effectively against his people.  Is it worth 44 Billion to win a battle in the Culture Wars? 

Because if Twitter goes away tomorrow what replaces it?  Maybe history provides a guide: the early days of Musk's Twitter remind me  of  the End of Napster.  People may not remember, but one of the biggest stories during the last half of 2001 was: what happens to the file-sharing movement when Napster is shuttered for  copyright infringement? September 11th changed media priorities, but what did happen was that users drifted to various alternative platforms that were harder to shut down:  OpenNap, pure P2P systems like Gnutella or Limewire, and even that weird Freenet thing that I could never get to do anything.  While many of these systems worked,  none of them worked as well: to find everything you could previously get on Napster, you needed to join multiple networks.  And connecting to an early P2P network sucked up a lot of bandwidth.  Everything else on your computer suddenly worked a lot slower.  

After Napster the world of  file-sharing sharing staggered on, but was permanently diminished.  This could be Elon's intent with Twitter.  And indeed the Exodus  from Twitter seems to be spilling over onto a couple of alternative platforms that have promise but are not yet ready for the growth they are currently experiencing.   May be history is repeating itself.

Public Drinkin': T.O. Is Poised To Create Heaven On Earth, But Do I Approve?

Next summer T.O. plans to let you drink publicly, or at least in parks and on beaches.   So far so awesome, but I have questions.  For example, does the parking lot in front of Walmart count as a public park?  If not, what is the point of the legislation?  That's where the LCs and the beer-stores are to start with.  And what is the definition of "a glass"?  As far as I'm concerned a bottle in a bag is a glass with a slightly unorthodox shape and permanent storage capabilities (ie. the cap, until you drop it or throw it away).  Again, we are left awaiting details.  

The city further notes that any site cleared for public consumption of alcohol will need bathroom facilities; luckily, in Scarborough, that can mean some trees behind a gas station.

In related news, T.O. also plans to have extra security in the parks starting this summer, so homeless folk won't gather around their campfires to tell stories, sing songs, and pitch tents for shelter. When the new public drinking laws come into effect this is going to cause conflict.  For who can tell the difference between sleeping homeless and some gentlemen sipping whiskey in the bush next to Gold's Gym who grew weary and were cuddling for warmth?  Not everyone carries the deed to their property with them everywhere, and yet under certain interpretations of the new by-law, this second group is OK because they are landowners.  Maybe the city could design some kind of app thing so when the park cops show up you can flash them a certified scan of your land titles records.  

Also, maybe these new park cops could be issued cork-screws for emergencies.  Some of us fancy types drink wine; not all the bottles come with twist-off tops..

Richard Warman on The New Section 13

 Pretty similar to the old Section 13, with a few twists, is the gist of it.  I am just summarizing, so go look at the stuff through the link.  Richard doesn't do much in the way of archiving:

1. It’s basically the same thing as the old s. 13 but explicitly doesn’t apply to social media companies...

2. The Bill provides the Commission with the ability to protect anonymity of a complainant – s. 40(8)...

3. Provides explicit power to dismiss a complaint as vexatious if there is no indication of hate speech in the material complained of...

4. Most of the remedies the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal can grant if a complaint relating to online hate is upheld remain the same (a permanent injunction and possible damages if someone is specifically targeted by the online hate). The only change is the potential penalty clause has been increased from $10,000 to $50,000...

5. The Tribunal can now order costs against a party for an abuse of process in relation to the Tribunal inquiry – see s. 53(2)...

I am looking forward this next go round.  Pretty much all of the specific claims against the old Section 13 were proven false and often defamatory of one party or another.  It will be difficult for the CPC or their surrogates to mount any attack against the new version that moves beyond broad, vague claims.  

I'm A Regular Guy

 

IDEAS THAT MATTER: The COVID Crisis--Are The Youths Trying to Kill Us?

I have often felt sad over the state of The Youths.  What with robots coming for their jobs and Climate Change, their future seems lacking.  But by the time its obvious that their lives will be a dystopian dead-end I will myself be retired and tucked safe away in a cottage somewhere, so I was never arsed enough to do anything about it.  Maybe that makes me  part of the problem.  

That aside,  the way the youths are misbehaving these days in regards to COVID-19--having parties and unprotected sex and then coming home and coughing on their elders...Well, I suspect a conspiracy.  They're engaging in Wealth Redistribution by stealth.  Go to your sex party, then later visit grandma and give her a hug.  Cough discretely.  If nothing happens, then nothing happens.  If she goes, maybe she left you a wad of cash, or maybe she left you The Daltons (fancy teacups, worth a wad of cash).

Life In Scarborough: The Plague Journal, Day II

Visited The Elsy (LCBO) today.  I notice that while they're knifing each other over toilet paper at the Walmart across the parking lot, here everything is calm.  People believe that Water and wipes are essential, booze some kind of peripheral benefit.  These people are fools!  Give it a couple of weeks, when they have all been forced to spend time at home WITH THEIR CHILDREN!  No Porn.  No sports but for  UFC fighting and repeats of Ali vs.Antonio Inoki   They will cry out for the sweet darkness that alcohol brings!

I will liquidate my stock of toilet paper on the toilet paper Dark Net, buy Pabst up the yin-yan and in April gouge these pathetic yokels until they squeal!   BOOYAH!

Life In Scarborough: The Plague Journal, Day I

This evening at the local Metro  I saw something resembling "panic buying".  Not quite at that point. Nobody got violent.  More like the kind of lineups you see before the Superbowl or a long-weekend.  Except everyone, everyone, was buying toilet paper and bottled water.  Nobody was buying beer.

Which doesn't make any sense: you buy toilet paper and bottled water when you're expecting the Zombie apocalypse, or basic services to fail, not when you're expecting a sharp economic downturn. 

I wonder if these people know something I don't?

On The Existence of Street Pianos In Toronto Community Centers

I used to be totally against them.  It was always some no-talent eight year old plinking out a ghastly version of Chopsticks and you can't tell them they suck or STFU! because their parents will get upset and report you to the facility staff because you haven't positively uplifted  their precious snowflake.

But now I am actually listening to some guy with honest-to-gawd training and it isn't so bad.  He's playing some classical shit.  "BA DA LOONG DOONG DOONG PING!  PING! PING! PING!  BA DA LOONG DOONG DOONG PING!  PING! PING! PING!"  Maybe Mozart.  Definitely not Zep, and not that Billy Eyelash kid.  You notice she's always getting nose-bleeds, by the way?  In every video I watch.  She's anemic and she should see a doctor.  And her brother, who writes her stuff,  should go into a used music store somewhere and buy an electric guitar.  They're probably cheap as fuck these days because  young musicians don't know what to do with them.  Billy's brother could rediscover the power chord or something.

In any case, he should buy his Sis some iron tablets.

As for these electric guitar thingys.  They use them in the video below.  Young people should take note.  They would make your music suck way less.

National Post Publishes Correction

BOOYAH!  JOB DONE!  The Natty Post corrects in response to this story:

Editor’s note: In the original article, Michael Rogers intended to say “early evolutionary ancestors” instead of Neanderthals when speaking about the agricultural revolution. As well, he intended to say there’s no anthropological evidence of Type 2 diabetes, not Type 1. All changes have been made in his quotes. 

Not even sure the phrase "early evolutionary ancestors" cuts it science-wise in this context but fuck it I'm in  a good mood.  We'll let it go.  Kudos to Bianca Bharti for fixing things and being a good sport about it.  As for Doc Rogers, well they say he is from the University of Guelph.  I had a friend who went there.  When I asked him what it was like he said Guelph is the sound a whale makes when it swallows.  I don't know what that means but I don't think its a compliment.

National Post Publishes Absolute Bullshit Re Beyond Meat

The absolute bullshit is this bit:

“For the last million years, we’ve evolved with a very specific diet that’s been based on whole foods,” [Michael] Rogers said. “There hasn’t been a change in our diets this drastic in all of human evolution with the exception of one event in human history: when the Neanderthals ventured from forests into pastoral land and started … agricultural practices,” more than 12,000 years ago.

I don't know who Michael Rogers is, but this kind of quote is the kind of thing that makes you think he isn't much of an expert.  I mean, the timing of wheat domestication is about right, a couple thousand years too early, maybe.  But the species is wrong.  The last Neanderthals walked maybe 40,000 years before crops were domesticated, unless Mr. Rogers knows something nobody else does.

Seriously, this is a big fat fucking boner of a mistake: Neanderthals invented agriculture.  BULLSHIT!!!   That the NP published it without  fact checking is embarrassing.  And if you are trying to criticize alt-meat, making this kind of claim isn't going to help.

PS.  I have never tried a Beyond Meat product nor do I have an opinion on the company.

Trans Mountain Pipeline Approved

...but far from built.

 I've talked about this  before.  My opinion is that Trudeau did the right thing by approving the pipeline.  You can't really rule this country if the entire middle bit hates your guts because you took away their one salable product.  (Well, that's an exaggeration: Sask has wheat; Alta. has pig shit; and Manitoba has Winnipeg, the Miami of the frozen tundra, for tourism.  But I digress).  And the upcoming election is basically Libs vs. Tories with the two hippy parties as possible spoilers.  Who would you prefer on the climate file, the guys who instituted a National Carbon Tax or the guys who are taking Doug Ford's climate plan national?

But I don't think it should be built, and am pretty sure it won't be built.  And this is due to the lawsuits various FN and other actors will launch, and the mass protests outside of Vancouver that will happen if the lawsuits fail. Which means that today's announcement is a sideshow at best. But I'm betting we don't even get to the "George-Clooney-chains-himself-to-a-bulldozer" stage of things.  I suspect the reason "consultations" with FN groups have failed in the past is that if they were ever done property the result would be too expensive for the oil companies to proceed.  I suspect that will be the case in the future.   But the point is there is more than one way to skin a cat and we shouldn't expect the Trudeau government to have to skin all the cats all the time.

Mann Wins!!!! Frontier Centre for Public Policy FOLDS!!!!!!!!!!!!

Congratulations to Dr. Michael Mann for successfully putting the boots to Winnipeg's Frontier Centre for Public Policy.  They defamed him; he fought back and won.  See their grovelling apology below.  Bask in their tears.   Not much to say other than  note the dates when the first lies were told: 2011 and 2012.  Seven or eight years between the time someone allegedly defames you and the time some court says they did or didn't, is about average in this country.  You have to have a sticktoitiveness to carry the whole thing through to the end that not many people possess.  Good on Mr. Mann for hanging in there.

And there's still Mark Steyn's ass left to kick.  I so look forward to the day.

PCPO Budget Is Mild Stuff

I don't like the directions taken; cutting healthcare spending below the rate of inflation, and etc.  But this government in this budget is definitely no Mike Harris Mark II.   Mind you, they'll never meet their deficit reduction targets at this rate, but they've probably figured that nobody really gives a shit.  So the PCPO has learned something over the last 20 years.  Mind you also, they're still on course for a battle with the OTF and a possible teacher's strike, maybe as soon as the summer (I think the contracts come up July 2019).  Open battles with Ontario's teachers are a losing proposition, which is another thing Mike Harris never learned.  People say they love their kids but actually raising them through their school years is a pain in the ass.  They get resentful if the government makes them do it.  We'll see if Ford and co. figure this one out as well.

Doug Ford's OHIP Changes: A Bummer, or Not?

I'm especially wondering about his plan to cut back on pain relief for colonoscopies.  I've gone through the procedure twice.  First time around they hit me with a General and I still didn't pass out.  I watched on a B&W TV screen as they maneuvered the probe up and down my ass.  It was like watching a guy wandering through a big sewer system with a cheap flashlight.  I pointed at the TV and asked what's that and the doctor said motherfucker you're awake you must really know your way around narcotics!  But I don't remember any actual pain, so maybe I'm with Doug on this one.

Mind you, they also want to cut funds for pain relief when they remove the polyps they find during the colonoscopy.  I didn't have polyps, but from what I hear what they do is they stick the end of the probe in some liquid oxygen so its really cold, they nail the polyp with the cold end so it freezes/burns like a wart, but one that's up your ass.  And then they send another probe with snippers at its end to snip the thing off. 

So I think Doug loses me here.

Life In Scarborough: The Fried Pork Rinds of Scarborough

Was inside the Jian Hing market at Markham and Lawrence on Family Day, looking for Filipino  Pork Rinds.  They have about 40 different varieties at Jian Hing.  I'm not kidding, there's a whole aisle devoted to nothing but.  Filipino  Pork Rinds are basically deep-fried pig-skin; you can get them either  "fat on" or "fat off", which means there's chunks of deep-fried pork-fat still stuck to them, or not.  I usually buy the "fat off" kind.  I prefer  the "fat on" version, but if I eat too much my sodium level spikes and the water in my inner ear backs up and I get the bed-spins for a week.

So I'm in the cash-line behind this old Filipino guy.  He looks at my 2 big bags of Chicharron Old Fashioned Fat Off Flavor and asks.  "You like those?"

I say: "Yes.  They're good, not good for you.  I know that."

And he laughs and tells me how they eat them back home.  Apparently, they dip them in vinegar, which seems redundant to me, like stuffing an H-Bomb full of gunpowder.  And  they also dip them in some kind of red or black pepper sauce.

When we have both gone through the line  I say "take care" and he says "stay healthy" the way Stanley Tucchi says "be careful" to Zach Quinto in that scene from Margin Call.

Flying Today

Horrible behavior but  it wouldn't have happened 50 yrs ago because everyone would have had enough leg room.  I flew Air Canada Rouge (@AirCanadaRouge) in 2018 and it was  like being crew on a WWI submarine.  Something has to change.

Toronto The Unready

WTF happened?  Did the dispatcher pass out just before the storm hit?  Did the plow-guy bust a leg trying to smuggle a hooker into the barracks through a back window?  Or did they stop at VP and say Fuck it its Scarborough lets turn around and plow The Bridle Path twice?  The city's East-end this morning is a snowy hell-scape with near impassable roads!  But the thing is, as soon as you get North of Steeles the streets are bare, even the side-streets...even the arena parking lots.  So it can be done.  And yet Markham Road, the main drag out this way, is like the trail out of Zeballos.  If I wanted to live in the countryside, I would move there. 

Scarborough should secede and join Markham, or maybe Pickering, whoever gives the best deal on snow-plow services.  I hear there's always something exciting going on in Pickering.