The last time I gave much thought to Madness was a few years back when, while spending Christmas in Scotland, I saw this commercial on TV:

Yes, that’s Madness singer Suggs using his band’s biggest hit to help sell fish sticks. I didn’t mind it, really, because I was always a big fan of both Madness and fish sticks.

Early on as my tastes in music began to emerge, I decided that I liked bands with a sense of humour and for a kid raised on Monty Python and, I’ll admit it, Benny Hill, Madness suited that requirement very well indeed. It might be why I was hesitant at first to like Nirvana or Oasis in the 90’s. They seemed so miserable to be on stage. Go sit in a cubicle for a week and then tell me how awful it is to play and record music.

After losing track of them for the last twenty years or so, I was surprised when I heard their single “Sugar and Spice” on Radio 2 last week. It was from “The Liberty of Norton Folgate”, the first studio album off all new material in ten years. It came out in May. It’s a funny thing when you realize that artists you like have been at it for decades and that the stuff that connects with you may not be the most current, or the most popular, or will win the approval of the hipsters who liked that thing that you like long before it became trendy to like it and therefore they don’t like it anymore and you’re lame for still liking it. Despite having been pushed aside by a star system that prizes youth above all, Madness are still out there, doing their thing.

I’ve been listening to the album almost non-stop for a while now and I have to say it might be the best thing they’ve ever done.

Welcome back to the Nutty Boys.

Behold the hottness that is Amanda Lang

“Let’s also say that change is neither good or bad. It simply is. It can be greeted with terror or joy: a tantrum that says, ‘I want it the way it was,’ or a dance that says, ‘Look, it’s something new.’” -Don Draper, Mad Men.

It’s been almost two weeks since CBC Newsworld dropped the “world” from its title and refashioned itself into what I always assumed it was supposed to be: an (almost) 24 hour news network.

The result is a faster pace, more on-screen graphics, and the absence of chairs. The response to this has been largely negative, particularly in regards to the CBC’s flagship programme, “The National”, which has Peter Mansbridge standing as he delivers the news, which now zips by faster than you can process it.

I’m not sure why it seems unseemly for a newsreader to do their jobs while standing. We’re just more comfortable seeing Peter sit a desk, even though it’s not like that’s his actual working desk. You never saw pictures of the kids or his Dilbert desk calendar or his half-eaten sandwich from lunch. It’s a set.

And yet it’s ingrained in us that news delivered while seated is Serious News and news delivered while standing is Infotainment, the dirty sort of flummery practiced by Toronto’s City-TV or CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and his Jedi Council holograms. Don’t know why that is. When her back was acting up, Mary Walsh used to do her Marg Delahunty character from her big comfy bed and I still came away from it with a bucketful of her opinions. I don’t think Peter would go that far, or if Wendy Mesley would join him for her reports. Perhaps she would, but only if she wore her haz-mat suit (video link).

I think Newsworld was due for a shot in the arm in the way it presents the news  and I think this is a step in the right direction. Why was a show about people having their antiques appraised considered news, anyway? That said, I have a few suggestions. Keep in mind, I’m neither a graphic designer nor a journalist, just a viewer so for what it’s worth:

• Slow down. You don’t have to rush through every story. Take time to put it in context.
• Drop the news crawl, which now slides in and out the bottom of the screen. I know every news network uses them but how about being the network that gives you news from one source at a time?
• The name: CBC News Network. Drop the “network”. I know it’s a network. I have them in my cable package. “CBC News” is fine.
• Streamline the on-screen graphics so they’re not taking up a third of my screen.
• Not sure what the point of Lang & O’Leary is.
• Power and Politics with Evan Soloman has been a source of fireworks lately, and Kady O’Malley is a welcome addition, but what are you going to do for two hours when the House is not sitting?
• As for the National, please give Wendy Mesley her dignity back.

I don’t what is prompting these changes. I wonder if it’s to retain the appearance of relevancy before a federal government that has been openly hostile to the broadcaster. CBC is in a perpetual no-win scenario with the public: If they don’t get ratings, people question the need for their funding and if they do, they’re accused of selling out to attract the ADHD generation or competing with the privates and again, people question the need for public broadcasting.

While there are about a hundred things I’d do if I were in charge of it, I’m pretty patient when it comes to my CBC. I understand that they have the right to try new things so it’s natural that some will work and some won’t. The National, however, needs to return to its original purpose of being Canada’s premier news broadcast. But I’m not fussed if Peter stands or sits while doing that.

So here are the first 8 minutes of the V remake. Obviously, I don’t think we’re to expect anything revolutionary here but I do want to point out a few things right off the bat:

• Elizabeth Mitchell
• The kind of meta ID4 joke
• Elizabeth Mitchell
• The science vs faith conflict can only be resolved through an alien invasion.
• No red jumpsuits!
• Jesus tries to take out a guy in a wheelchair. Asshole.
• Elizabeth Mitchell
• No Blu-Blockers!
• Monica Baccarin

Beyond that, it seems that if the aliens are going to arrive with a false message of peace and love, you’d think they’d do it in a less terrifying way than hovering over cities and taking out a jet fighter.

And, going by the end credits, they will use porno music for the score.

Are there better things I could be doing with my spare time? Only about a hundred but I’ll still watch it.

Remember last week when I said I was looking for “the positive, the optimistic, and the constructive”?  On Babble’s Strollerderby blog, there was an item about an author, Lauren Myracle, who writes for pre-teens. Scholastic, which features book fairs for young readers, had requested that she drop any references to one of her characters having two mothers. If not, her book would not be featured. The author, of course, refused.

The blog post also included this response from a librarian (which I saw a while back on AJ Kandy’s Twitter feed) to a concerned mother who wanted a children’s book featuring a same-sex wedding removed from the library. Instead of snidely dismissing her, he wrote a well-thought out response, to address her objection and used library policies, the U.S. Constitution, the law, and the fact that philosophies can vary within a community to defend his inclusion of the book.

Imagine if people actually took time to openly and politely discuss their differences instead of shouting each other down. Well, cable news and talk radio and about half the blogosphere and most of the Twitterverse would cease to exist but would there also be a down side?

More of this please.

Every now and again, my best friend from high school, who currently lives in Toronto, and I get in touch by phone to catch up. When we most recently met up, we recalled some of our behaviour during our formative years with some measure of embarrassment.

“Why?” I asked him, “Was it so important for me to be so angry and quarrelsome?” My life was alright then. I had a decent home and a good, if a little distant, family. I had modest life goals which would, admittedly, change over time.

My friend had a simple answer, “because we were assholes.” While I prefer to think of my younger self as a jackass, he’s not far off the mark. Other kids with similar backgrounds didn’t behave as I did but for whatever reason, I wore my cynicism as a badge of honour throughout most of my teens and twenties.

To be honest, I actually flipped between cynicism and naivety constantly. I can’t pretend I was all jaded when my favourite album in high school was Paul Simon’s Graceland, ferchrissakes.

Despite that, I spent much of my adulthood believing that cynicism is most often the correct response to pretty much everything. It’s only recently that I’ve discovered how lazy an attitude that is. It’s an instant gratification thing whereas being optimistic may take longer to pay off but the emotional rewards may be richer. And science (science!) seems to agree. Of course, there is a line between being optimistic and being deluded, just as there is there is a line between being a healthy skeptic and being a nihilist.

All of this is to say is that I’ve been making a concerted effort to bring more positive influences in my life. This has to do with adjusting my personal attitudes but mostly it has to do with not seeking out things on the internet that I know will do nothing but anger me.

So I stopped reading Mark Steyn in Macleans. He’s a man of no real accomplishment, other than a few books about musical theatre, who asks us, week after week, to join him in his seething hatred of the evil Mohammedans. What can I do about that? Leave a comment on the website, telling him he’s wrong? He’s an inconsequential boor.

And I probably should be angry about this homophobic woman but Charlie Brooker does such a good job skewering her that the situation would hardly be improved by my own mute outrage.

And while I’m at it, I should probably stop overdosing on The Huffington Post which gets me outraged over things that occur in a nation that I don’t live in. At least with Rabble, when I get pissed off, I have option of emailing my MP, which I do, all the time.

After dinner is complete, and the lad has his supper, and we take our nightly walk, and the garbage and recycling is taken out, and the lad has his bath, and the floor is cleaned, and the lad has his bottle, and I read him his story, and he’s put to bed, and the tea is made, I have, maybe, two hours a night of quiet time to myself. So maybe it’s not a constructive use of my free time to watch Real Time with Bill Maher. Even if I generally agree with him most of the time, I find him to be such a sneering dick that it makes me question my own beliefs.

I’m tired of snideness, bile, and smugness as reflexive attitudes. And so I’m going to be seeking the positive, the optimistic, and the constructive.

Yes, I know, I’ll be searching for a while.

Over the years, recommendations have changed for travelling by car with an infant or child. Here are some highlights which show how our thinking on the issue of public safety has evolved:

• 1909 – “The Royal Canadian Ministry for The Well Being of Livestock and Human Infants would like to remind parents that it is ill-advised to transport children in a motor-car by tying a rope around their waists and dragging them behind the vehicle. While a common practice in many provinces, this can result in injuries that would later deprive them of their ability to work as labourers. If there is no alternative transportation available, drivers are requested not to exceed 15mph.”
• 1929 – “The Royal Canadian Ministry for the Regulation of Automobiles would like to remind car owners that children should be discouraged from driving their parents’ automobiles until their feet can easily reach the pedals.”
• 1959 – “The Department of Health recommends that, when travelling by automobile, children are requested to remain in the back seat while the car is in motion, where they may roam freely and safely.”
• 1969 – “The National Transportation Safety Board in association with the Department for the Prevention of Negative Vibes would like to advise that a recall has been issued on macramé infant restraining devices.”
• 1979 – “Due to a number of recent accidents, The Department of Health would like to remind drivers of station wagons that children should not be permitted to roam freely in the back of the automobile if there are free seats. Additionally, for safety reasons, children should not be in the back of the station wagon if the driver is also transporting a case of glass Pop Shoppe bottles.”
• 1989 – “Health Canada would like to remind drivers that, if they are smoking in a car with children present, please crack the window open, weather permitting.”
• 1999 – “In the event the so-called Y2K bug results in the cessation of all electronic devices, drivers are cautioned against driving with children in the car on December 31.”
• 2007 – “Rear-facing car-seats should be used for infants until at least 12 months of age.”
• 2008 – “Make that 24 months.”
• 2009 – “They really should be in the car as little as possible. If you love your child, you’ll listen to us.”
• 2019 – “What the Hell are you doing? ! What did we just tell you? Here, just give us the baby.  Jesus.”

“Greetings from the Shire!”

There is the very good possibility that we’ll be in full-on election mode this time next month. Now for political nerds like me, that’s fantastic but other Canadians aren’t as thrilled with the prospect.

“But we just had an election. I don’t want another so soon,” they whine as, halfway around the world, Iranians get arrested for wanting free and fair elections. “Besides, it might be cold that day.”

Oh, boo hoo. Suck it up. We voted a minority government, and the last day of the current campaign is always the first day of the next one. We can go at any time. Or we can go coalition government like we almost did last  year. It’s all part of the process we agreed to. You want a four year gap between elections? Give a party a majority.

Except, it’s hard isn’t it? Nobody’s particularly jazzed about Stephen Harper as a prime minister nor Michael Ignatieff as Liberal Leader. Meanwhile, the BQ, NDP, and Greens are not budging in the polls in any meaningful way.

It’s actually as good a time as any for an election. The Liberals can only threaten to vote against the government for so long before they actually do it. And if you’re tired of the two main options, an election may be the only way to change anything. Look at the possible outcomes:

• Conservative majority: Ignatieff quits.
• Conservative minority: Harper and Ignatieff quit.
• Liberal majority: Harper quits.
• Liberal minority: Harper quits.
• NDP majority: Just kidding.

My predictions are usually wrong but I don’t think the Liberals are going to win this one and that may be better for everyone all around in the long run.  So who would replace him? Well, you know how you weren’t all that crazy about someone when you knew them but then when they go away, you kind of miss them?

Somewhere in Hamilton, Sheila Copps sits in front of Newsworld, tents her fingers, and waits.

“I don’t have a lot of personal life experience, but if I have learned anything from my Sims family, when a child doesn’t see his father enough, he starts to jump up and down, and then his mood level will drop–until he pees himself.”

-Liz Lemon, “30 Rock”

Dear Bud Bud

One year ago, on a Sunday morning, I was sitting on the computer, going through my Google Reader, as your mother was enjoying a breakfast of leftover apple pie when you gave us a heads up that you were coming. And that was the end of our lazy Sundays for, well, ever.

Within an hour we were at the hospital and after several hours of false starts, you arrived at 2:27am, Monday morning, September 1st, 2008. And ever since then, I can say that we’ve been living in a post-9/1 world.

Despite all the warnings we were given about big babies, you came out completely average at 7 pounds, 6 oz. Did you know your pre-birth nickname was Hagrid? You lived up to it, of course when you quickly grew to a bigger than average baby and, so far, one with a happy disposition.

Your mother and I aren’t sure what we did to deserve such a good child. We’re certainly not the luckiest people in the world. So perhaps you’re here to make up for that.

Today, you can stand a little bit but you still can’t walk. However, you do think you can run and that means you fall down a lot and you cry, until we pick you up and hug you. You might have noticed we hug you a lot. It’s the first thing I do when you wake up in the morning, just before we open the curtains to find out what kind of day it is.

This coming year, you’ll be walking and talking more. You’ll fall down a little less and will say a little more than “mama”, “dada”, and “diaper”.

I can’t wait to see where you’ll go and to hear what you have to say.

You’ve done year one. Now, on to year two.

I love you,

Daddy.

Yahoo! has a list of some of the most clueless things people have said to pregant women. For example, “You must be having a girl—they say that girl babies steal their mother’s beauty”.

I’m pretty sure there’s a list out there of things people have said to mothers of young children as well. You know, those helpful hints doled out by strangers in a practice that has come to be known as “drive-by parenting”? Kerry can add a few items to such a list like, like being called a “damned welfare mother” by a passing old man. Or being admonished for feeding James a bottle in public because, as the woman put it, “it’s not the answer to everything”.

For the record – we are not on welfare. I have a job and Kerry is on extended Maternity Leave. We’re just brokity-ass broke all the time.

As a dad, though, I can’t say that I’ve had these experiences. More than likely it’s because women are still considered the primary caregivers so it’s rarer for men to be out in public with the kids on a weekday. When men are in the public with the kids, particularly when Mum isn’t around, we’re treated as heroes just for showing up.

We could be giving our kids Alec Baldwin’s speech from Glengarry Glen Ross and we’d still get a pass.

As you can imagine, the latest news to burn up the internet is the New Brunswick government’s decision to add a slogan to provincial license plates.

The Zen-like slogan in English is “be … in this place” and in French is “être … ici on le peut”. This would be the first time since the early 70’s that the plates have had a slogan. The plates can be viewed here. But be patient, the page may take a while to load to due to high traffic volume.

At the link to the CBC story, reaction to the plates has been mixed. Some people don’t like the colours. Some don’t like the font size. Others don’t like the two languages. Still others don’t like the choices given for the alternative conservation-themed plates. Others wished we could return to the days when the plates read “Picture Province”.

And to think I’m seriously considering a move back there.