July 24:
http://www.publiceyeonline.com/archives/001643.html

July 24:
http://www.publiceyeonline.com/archives/001644.html

July 24:
http://www.publiceyeonline.com/archives/001646.html

July 25:
http://www.publiceyeonline.com/archives/001652.html

entries include links to other relevant sources (CanWest Global Corp.’s news release, The Tyee, etc.)

Thanks, Sean Holman, for turning the heat up on this one…!

That’s quite a story, BTW, with your former phil. professor. Well, it wouldn’t have happened with Dr.Weimaraner, eh?

Incidentally, your comment is showing up split into two sections, as tail end to my last comment (#5) and as separate comment on its own (#6). I wonder if that’s just my browser, or some other bug?

Yiddish, perhaps more than other languages, also has (and had) many regional or geographic nuances. Heibel (to my ear seems like it should be heibleIt has given my atheistic nature pause to consider that a perpetual penchant for getting into trouble is somehow …well, pre-ordained, and there have indeed been times when I wondered whether blogging (or building a crazy wiki) was the equivalent of entering a field filled with the bulls of civility, good manners, and status quo-ness, all the while dressed with a swooping red cape tied around the neck. And yet, to paraphrase every heibelmaker who has gone before me: what the hell? Why not pursue a vain cause?

to which I comment—–> nothing is pre-ordained until viewed in retrospect.

There are self-fulfilling prophecies, there is pattern behavior. If all were preset, our lives would simply be episodes of The Twilight Zone. And not worth the living, as we’d be droids and drones of some others’ design(s).

I had a Calvinist professor when I was in college. He believed everything was preordained, including giving me a bad grade as an extension of his raving, raging anti-Semiticism. And I’d Aced the final of his class. And this was, of all things, a LOGIC course. He gave me an F. Yet I was one of only two students in the class who really got the math, the philosophy, et al….a girl who sat next to me was the other student who got it — we joked that we grokked it, but we knew he had disdain for SciFi, so we kept that to ourselves.

So he was rather panic-stricken when I showed up outside his house with a baseball bat as he came out to walk his beloved little Yorkie pooch, and I announced that it was preordained that I would be brutally and slowly killing the loathesome cur by clubbing it to death. And right in front of his eyes, at that, as [preordained] punishment for failing a student who had Aced the course.

Of course I didn’t so much as touch the dog, but I did scare the the hell out of the professor. I believe, between the tears (for the pooch) and the immense, intense hatred (for me) he had, for a brief moment, second thoughts. He also wet his pants, which was for me, a small victory. He took the dog for a walk, and became incontinent when I showed up and rocked his world out of the straight (and preordained) narrow.

The ultimate joke was on me — the grade held, he was Chair of the Philosophy Dept., I had no recourse available to me.

It wasn’t preordained. It was just an object lesson. And in this case, I think, all around. Except, maybe, for the loathesome cur, who simply yipped, peed, shat, and went home with his master, a lowlife believer in preordination who failed me in a class in which I’d actually excelled.

Life is often unfair. But not preodained.

Victorians have been asked so often to weigh everything according to whether or not “the tourists will like it” that it has become an ingrained and unquestioned shibboleth. Many people, unable to think for themselves or exercise their imaginations, can’t even imagine that tourists might actually like some changes, and has blinded them into believing that the city should be cast in amber forever. Is genuflection before the gods of “tradition” and “small-scale urbanity” really benefitting residents, or does it contribute to the “resort mentality” in ways that overbuilding of downtown residential condos couldn’t hope to match? Does it benefit residents, or does it reinforce the nightmarish “Disney-esque” qualities enshrined by touristic approaches to the city? As for the “left” or the anti-business/ anti-corporate crowd: Is relentless cynicism over development and change in downtown Victoria really a “critique” of bad capitalism, for example, or does it play into the hands of those who already hold far too any strings here? Do you really think we can turn back the clocks or stem the tide?

After one of my letters-to-the-editor was published in the local paper (Victoria News, not Times-Colonist), the journalist whose reporting I had critiqued called me on the phone. His suggestion — and I’m not making this up — was that we could perhaps “save” Victoria if we had universal male contraception and stopped people from coming here. That was his answer to “development,” which he clearly resented and which is why he wrote a tendentious piece full of innuendo about the proposed development now known as The Falls. His is a common approach and it’s essentially a scorched earth policy: I’ve got mine, I made it here, I’m all set, and now let’s pull up the drawbridge. Sterilise all the men, stop people from breeding, and eventually we’ll be able to handle all our problems.

That’s our press, folks. It’s nice to know that things are so …sane (not), over in the newsroom. The question is: how great is the distance between that newsroom and chambers of council? And how great is the space in people’s heads, and what is it filled with?