Quotulatiousness

July 14, 2012

Ontario’s latest headache in the education ministry

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Government, Humour — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:29

Mark Schatzker explains the new disaster unfolding in the Ontario government’s education file:

According to reports, a number of large unions, including CUPE, IATSE and the United Steelworkers, are already courting prominent Toronto-area student leaders. It is expected that any negotiation will include a list of long-standing student grievances. Top among them is the issue of merit based marking.

“Someone has to do something about all these losers who hog all the best marks,” said Stu, a grade 11 student at Central Etobicoke High School who did “brutal” in Functions and Applications this year.

His friend and co-organizer Luke says a union will be able to push for a “marks tax” on the top one per cent of students. “You have these total nerds who get, like 98 in Bio,” Luke explained. “We think they should give five or ten per cent of those marks to the students who get 45.”

“We have to stop rewarding greed,” Stu said.

Over at Parkside Elementary School in Scarborough, Isabelle, who is in grade seven, is also taking up the fight to make Toronto schools a closed shop. At the top of her grievance list: “geographism.”

“The way it works right now,” Isabelle explained, “is that you have to go to whatever school is closest to your house. But what if your best friend from music camp goes to a different school? How is that, like, fair?”

Sources in the Ministry of Education say the province is already close to signing a deal with elementary students with a benefits package that includes: cupcake Fridays, a ban on quinoa, and a 5.7 per cent increase in recess every year for the next four years, raising it to 20.9 minutes by 2017. (It is presently 15 minutes.)

Discovering old favourites

Filed under: Cancon, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:20

I was delighted to discover last night that my favourite Quebec folk group has finally appeared in digital form on iTunes. I first heard the music of Barde in about 1978 and was immediately captivated by it. It’s a blend of Celtic music with a Quebec twist. Here’s their entry in the Canadian Pop Encyclopedia:

Richard Chapman (vocals, mandolin, banjo, dulcimer, guitar)
Toby Cinnsealac (aka Kinsella) (tin flute, tin whistle, recorders, clarinet, tambourine)
Pierre Guerin (vocals, acoustic guitar, accordion, concertina, flute, recorder)
Chris (aka Crilly) MacRaghallaigh (vocals, violin, keyboards, bodhran, tambourine)
Elliot Selick (violin, tin flute, tin whistle, banjo)
Ed Moore (bodhran, tambourine, concertina, tin flute, tin whistle, glockenspiel)
Jacques Joubert (violin; 1983)
Richard Paquette (keyboards; 1983)
Jocelyn Therrien (bass; 1983)

This sextet from Montreal was formed in 1973 and found their brand of Acadian & Celtic reels and jigs popular around the Maritimes, Quebec and overseas in Europe. The group was known for its utilization of a twin Celtic fiddle sound courtesy of Crilly and Selick.

They signed to Polygram then to Direction Records, then to Flying Fish, and finally to Porte Parole. Their eponymous debut, Barde, was released in 1977. By their the second album, Images, in 1978 Chris Crilly had introduced keyboards in the form of synths and pianos. By 1983’s Voyage Selick had also left and the remaining members changed musical direction by incorporating keyboards bass and violin courtesy of studio musicians Jacques Joubert, Richard Paquette, and Jocelyn Therrien.

Pierre Guerin led a revamped Barde at the 10th Annual Winnipeg Folk Festival. The band finally disbanded for good shortly thereafter with Guerin marrying and settling in the St. Boniface region of Winnipeg. He became a disc jockey before becoming Artistic Director of The Winnipeg Folk Festival.

Everyone running a WordPress blog should recognize these

Filed under: Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:03

Cory Doctorow at boingboing on the most common type of spam comment encountered on a WordPress blog (like Quotulatiousness):

This morning, I woke up to find that someone who was new to the tool (or unclear on the concept) had left a spam with all of the default comment messages in it, dumping the full database of anodyne comments intended to fool both the spam-filter and the human operator into thinking that the sender had read the post and was replying to it. The comments are necessarily generic, as they are meant to apply to literally any WordPress post on any site, ever. I wonder if the poor grammar and odd phrasing is deliberate, intended to make human moderators less suspicious and to lead them to think that some earnest foreigner is trying desperately to compliment them across the language barrier.

The comments also tend to invite replies, with mild complaints about RSS errors and layout problems. They mention spouses, cousins and friends. All in all, they’re a curious collection of spammers’ hypotheses about what will appeal to the vanity and goodwill of people who run legitimate WP sites.

I usually start my blogging day by quickly scanning through 20-30 of these, just in case some poor human’s comment got caught by the spamcatcher (it’s vanishingly rare for this to happen, in my experience).

Flood policy and personal responsibility

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Government — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:03

James Delingpole on the British government’s latest announcements on flood policy:

Yesterday it was reported that the Coalition had decided we should all be liable for the cost of flood damage, regardless of where we live. This puzzled me, as the Coalition’s decisions so often do. The only way it would make any kind of sense would be if you believed a) flooding is a new and unnatural phenomenon resulting directly from late 20th century Man Made Climate Change or b) that everyone is now so stupid they cannot be trusted to act in their own best interests and that it is therefore government’s job to hold their hands and wipe their bottoms for them from cradle to grave.

To discount a) you only have to go somewhere like the River Severn, just below Worcester Cathedral, and look at the flood marks on the wall. Many of the most dramatic inundations happened in years long before “man made global warming” was even a sinister glint in Al Gore’s eye. This isn’t to say that the cost of flood damage hasn’t risen to unprecedented levels these last few decades. But that has more to do with our insane practice of allowing property developments to be built on flood plains, together with our unfortunate habit of paving and tarmacking everything (such as the front gardens we would once have kept as front gardens) which means that in times of high rainfall floodwater is likely to accumulate in drains more rapidly. Plus, of course, we’re all richer — so there’s more expensive property for flooding to damage.

But it’s the b) aspect I find more worrying because of the way it rides roughshod over the most basic principles of free market economics. Can we really assume that when anybody buys a house by a river — or near a floodplain — they don’t do so in the full knowledge that flood-risk is one of the prices they pay for their pleasing waterside ambience? The very idea is a nonsense. Buyers, being rational, will factor this into their calculations: “OK, so it will be great for fishing and swimming and boating. But getting insurance will be a bugger and we’d better not keep anything too precious on the ground floor.” These complexities will be reflected by the market. While the value of the property may be enhanced by its attractive location, it will simultaneously be decreased by its flood-damage potential.

QotD: Monty Python fans

Filed under: Humour, Media, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Monty Pythonites are a specific breed of movie quoters, ones you have to handle gently, like Renaissance Faire people and Dungeons & Dragons players (and if we’re being honest, the Venn Diagram on those three groups probably isn’t too complicated). Your film editor says this without judgment; I spent a fair amount of high school trading lines from the Parrot Sketch and “nudge nudge” with my friends, which probably (partially) explains why I didn’t spent a fair amount of high school on, y’know, dates. So my love for MPATHG is strong, but I (and all of us Python fans) must at least make the effort to resist the urge to insert “It’s just a flesh wound” and “It’s only a model” and “Ni” into every social situation. That said, if you can find an reasonable excuse to say “Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony” in an everyday conversation, well, I’m not going to judge you.

Jason Bailey, “The Movies People Need to Stop Quoting”, Flavorwire, 2012-07-12

Powered by WordPress