bob tarantino

Feed Reads 02.04.09

Still cleaning up a whole lotta RSS backlog, so here's some stuff I thought was interesting from way back in 2008:

• "Do 1.3 million people really earn their living from eBay?"  Nope.

• Mathew Ingram on file-sharing and books.

• Mary Abraham asks how "Gen Y" will affect big law firms (plus a follow-up post here).  Correct answer: they won't in any meaningful way.  But the technology associated with their arrival and the economic changes which are coincidentally occurring at the same time have a better chance of doing so.

• Simon Fodden pointed out a wicked-awesome online medieval law resource.

• Mathew Ingram (him again) has a link-rich post on whether comments qualify as "content".

• In the "good intentions" file, I suppose we should add McGill's Centre for Intellectual Property Policy effort at a new Copyright Act wiki (brought to my attention by slaw).  Unless I'm missing something, it appears to have died a rather ignominious death via lack of attention.

• One of slaw's all-time best posts, by Joel Alleyne, takes a look at the myth of the "paperless office".

• Yep, slaw again, this time with a post about the lunatic attempt by Major League Basebell to exercise control over the names and statistics of players.

More to come...

Feed Reads 05.11.08

A round-up of interesting (if miscellaneous) stuff that popped up in my RSS feeds:

• Torontoist looks at some buried Toronto history

• Dave Sim (of Cerebus fame and other small amounts of infamy) is back, with a meditation on the roots of anti-Semitism

• since I spent two weeks in Japan in the fall of 2007, I've become a bit of a Japanophile; Marcus Gee had a long piece in the Globe on Saturday examining what has happened to Japan (particularly its economy) over the past twenty or so years, and what the prospects are for the next twenty

• an 11-year old boy in Hamilton is being kept from his family and forced to undergo chemotherapy treatment to which neither he nor his parents consent

• Susan Neiman ponders whether Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is the greatest work of modern philosophy

• Slate explains how media outlets decide what country name to use (viz. Burma or Myanmar?)

Feed Reads 05.04.08

A collection of interesting things that popped up in my RSS feeds:

• The Shame of dot CA

• The new fame: internet celebrity

• the 2008 Pug Awards (Toronto's People's Choice Awards for Architecture) are online

• from TNR, Too Many People Own Homes

Stuff You Should Totally Read 11.20.07

The Red Hot Chili Peppers are suing US cable station Showtime over Showtime's use of the word "Californication" as the title of a show, "claiming the title is 'inherently distinctive, famous ... and immediately associated in the mind of the consumer' with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Singer Anthony Kiedis said in a statement, ' "Californication" is the signature CD, video and song of the band's career, and for some TV show to come along and steal our identity is not right.'".  Coming from any band, that's sad - coming from the band that released the classics Mother's Milk and Bloodsugarsexmagik, that is just so frickin' lame.

The Lupercale seems to have been discovered in Rome.

If you aren't in hysterics at some point while reading this story, you're broken:

as the morning light began to filter through the thick fog that often envelops San Francisco, viewers at Vista Point on the north end of the Golden Gate could make out the silhouette of a red Volkswagen Beetle. It was dangling from the underside of the bridge, 10 storeys above the water. A Canadian flag was painted on one side of the car. A big red “E” was on the other side.

I count myself as firmly agnostic, with strong gusts towards atheism, but the notion that a theological dispute from nearly a thousand years ago is still occupying efforts is so cool:  "A Vatican-Orthodox commission working to heal the 1,000-year split between the Catholic and Orthodox churches has agreed the pope has primacy over all bishops but disagrees over just what authority that primacy gives him."

"We know nationally there are a lot of people looking at what Wolfville does in this instance." You say that like it's a good thing.

Stuff You Should Totally Read 07.16.07

At UC Berkeley, they're using eBay as a near-perfect free market with which to test economic theory.  Evidently, the ancient Romans already had a term to describe the results being observed.

Blundering morons, colliding in darkness.  Or, CNN engages in a debate with Michael Moore.

Stephen Lewis' idiot son gets schooled.

I particularly enjoyed this column by Linda McQuaig, wherein she loudly rails against Conrad Black's National Post ("attack-dog fighting on behalf of Canada's financial elite", "same old thunderous voice of Big Business, but now cranked up to deafening levels, with even less attempt at 'balance'", "a new brand of ultra-right journalism: neoconservatism with cleavage") without ever once noting that she used to pen a column for that same paper (and in its earliest days of fire-breathing conservative revolution reactionary establishment protection, no less).

Stuff You Should Totally Read 07.11.07

I love reading Bob Lefsetz on music.  And the music industry.  Here he catalogues the swath of destruction wrought by the iPod.

Aaron Wherry's preview of Live Earth is, as usual with his writing, great stuff.  Helpfully, Wherry assists in my ongoing project to remind people that the music community used to loathe Senator Albert Gore, Jr. and his lovely wife, Tipper, for the efforts with the PMRC.  Am I the only person who remembers the 80s?

Almost everything one could possibly say about al Qaeda recruiting doctors has been said, but this is a nice summation.

I occasionally have nightmares about being uncontrollably swept high into the air - which means I probably wouldn't be a good candidate for this.  Still, though, that's just awesome - "Kent Couch settled down in his lawn chair with some snacks -- and a parachute".  The picture alone is worth your time.

Had we been asked to predict during, say, the Peace Sells... But Who's Buying? period that one day Dave Mustaine's Megadeth would be releasing albums which attack the United Nations, I'm sure we would have all had a good chuckle.  Evidently, we would have been wrong.

A survey of southeast Asian economies - all Potemkin villages?

A short history of the concentration of untrammeled presidential power in the White House.  It all started with FDR, evidently.

Stuff You Should Totally Read 07.10.07

This awesome slideshow on hip-hop battles in the age of YouTube includes an amazing(ly bad) home video from 50 Cent, who apparently is so copiously well-armed that the ATF just figures they'll let his possession of assault weapons slide.

One can assume that if anyone who comments on English politics is familiar with the story of how a spectacularly popular finance minister succeeded a tarnished prime minister, prompting breathless pronouncements about the imminent demise of their political opposition because the new PM was just so superawesomewickedcool, they didn't stick around to find out how it ended.  Hint: not so well for the party in question.

If you haven't been doing so, take a trip over to The Court, for the best commentary on Canadian Supreme Court decisions.  Recent discussions include the tort of negligent investigation, legal aid, the need for a court to deliver speedy written decisions, and freedom of expression in commercial advertising.  All good stuff.

Japan, atomic weapons, revisionist history and guilt.

Someone is writing a three volume series on the comics writing of Grant Morrison.  Imagine how many volumes would be needed to discuss the work of someone who was actually good.

Stuff You Should Totally Read 07.09.07

Excellent long piece at TNR on the continuing attractions of classical (read: Greek and Roman) culture.

Jaron Lanier muses on why popular music doesn't seem to be changing all that much anymore.

Y'know, the whole point of having a single Criminal Code is so that what constitutes criminal behaviour doesn't arbitrarily change when you pass an invisible internal border.  It's nice to see that, to paraphrase Dave Pirner, when it comes to marijuana possession, the right thing evidently changes from street to street.

I just finished reading The Fourth Horseman by Andrew Nikiforuk - cheerily subtitled "A Short History of Plagues, Scourges and Emerging Viruses".  It adopts a somewhat unorthodox tone, but it's well worth your time if you can track it down.

Stuff You Should Totally Read 07.05.07

Top 20 Worst Cover Songs in Pop Music History.  Complete with YouTube coverage.  Number twenty is Celine Dion covering AC/DC's "You Shook Me All Night Long".  You cannot possibly imagine how bad it is.

I'm evidently the only person who was not told about C2C: Canada's Journal of Ideas.  Check it out.

So... does anybody want to keep the CIA around? (hat tip: SDA)

A left initiative we can all get behind: refusing to pay taxes.

Three movies, all by themselves, have pulled in nearly $1 billion.  Hollywood is, nevertheless, still complaining.

Dan Gardner on the similarities and differences between Canadians and Americans - not as stark as the broader commentariat would have you believe.

Things You Should Totally Read 07.04.07

A post at The Economist blog queries whether economic growth in authoritarian regimes outstrips that found in politically free countries.  The chart seems to make the case that it does, but the analysis gets taken down in the comments.

MTV.com offers the conclusions arising from its internal debates about the ten greatest hip-hop groups of all time.  Allow me to point out the obvious: when the list contains a group (The Fugees) which released only two albums, one of which was vigorously ignored by, well, everyone, then the list is probably a mite flawed.

Social Distortion has a greatest hits compilation out.  For my money, I would recommend Live at the Roxy, instead - which also just happens to be one of the best live albums, like, ever.

"Garage mahal".  Now that's funny.  Peter Kormos also gets off one hell of a zinger: "What's truly sad is Ms. Broten's fixation on her husband's homeless Porsche, which simply illustrates how out of touch she and the Liberal government are with real Ontarians and the needs and concerns of hard-working folks."  Ow.

A thoughtful discussion is under way over at Oxblog about the differences between efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Things You Should Totally Read 07.03.07

After a long weekend break, you'd think I'd have more stuff for you to peruse...

Fred Kaplan, who's normally pretty useless at analyzing US foreign relations, offers a long and interesting take on the US/Russian detente.  He's still incapable of actually offering substantive prescriptions to supplement his criticisms ("Getting the Russians to make the sacrifice might require dangling an alternative enticement—material, diplomatic, or whatever" is about as close as you'll get to an actual proposal from the guy) but worth the read.

Dealing with normal product placements is enough of a headache from an entertainment lawyer's perspective - so the rise of "reverse product placement" just seems like even more of a ... challenge.  What prompts this? The temporary "re-branding" of various 7-Eleven outlets into Kwik-E-Mart locations, in honour of the upcoming The Simpsons movie.  The promotion will also involve the sale of Squishees and KrustyO's and Buzz Cola.  Any aspiring Duff Beer connoisseurs will remain stymied, however.

These are awesome.  (hat tip: Flea)

"The murderers did not just want body parts in general but female body parts in particular". Quite.  Another excellent piece by Hitchens.

"After all, who doesn’t love manatees?"  The naming of public schools - consequential or not?  It would be interesting to see a comparable analysis of Canadian public schools.

Stuff You Should Totally Read 06.29.07

Johann Hari goes on a National Review cruise, discovers, to his (and what is presumably meant to be our) shock that he disagrees with what the people around him are saying.  I hereby volunteer to attend The Nation's crusie and be similarly distraught upon disembarkation.

Back in 1999 or 2000, in what essentially functions as a previous life, I spent something like ten days in The Avon Old Farms Hotel, a wonderful place which is just the far side of the middle of nowhere.  Joey (Accordion Guy) deVilla had a much better time there than I did.  Balalaikas were involved.  For Joey, not for me.  *sad*

I think it's probably praiseworthy that Tony Blair, rather than retiring to what could likely have been a rather lucrative post-electoral politics life of, say, speechifying and book-writing, decided to take on the Gordian knot of, oh, solving the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.  It's praiseworthy, but also either a sign of maniacal hubris or a rather inspiring level of commitment that I wouldn't have expected.  This guy chalks it up to the former.

Apropos of this piece in TNR by Cass Sunstein on recent decisions of the US Supreme Court, let us note that thoughtful public intellectuals in the United States are continually engaged in discussions about the consequences of having a conservative/liberal president appointing conservative/liberal justices (see also here and here for the rather enjoyable spectacle of watching liberal commentators splutter in astonishment).  Let us also note that, for the most part, the Canadian commentariat, media and legal establishment absolutely refuse to even consider the possibility that the exact same dynamic occurs in this country.

As we gear up for the birthday celebration of what is, except for our lousy weather, the best country in the world, it's worth reminding ourselves of the fact that so few of us seem to know or appreciate our own history or culture (whatever else you want to say about it, the fact that only eight friggin' percent of respondents correctly identified the Queen as Canada's head of state is just ... heart-breaking).

Stuff You Should Totally Read 06.28.07

Check out the Podcasting Legal Guide for Canada (perhaps optimistically subtitled "Northern Rules for the Revolution") created by Creative Commons Canada. (hat tip: Geist)

Sheila Copps twice refers to St Jean Baptiste day as "Quebec's national day" in this column.  So now not just the Quebecois are a nation, but so to is Quebec itself?  And from a Chretienite, to boot.  Wonders never cease.

Videogames and education just don't work well together.

As "left" political parties (cf. British Labour, American Democrats and Canadian Liberals) became more "right" in the 1990s, are "right" political parties in the process of becoming more "left"?

Looking for a map showing where in Toronto murders occurred in 2005, 2006 and 2007?  Want the information to be sortable by age of victim, gender of victim and type of homicide?  Look no further.

MTV covers the Billboard album chart action: Jovi at #1 and White Stripes at #2.  Which means that last week was my favourite week for music all year.  Except that the new Bon Jovi album blows.  But I still love those dumb bastards anyways.  It's complicated.

Stuff You Should Totally Read 06.27.07

Oliver Kamm writes in TNR about the possible foreign policy of new British PM Gordon Brown, and also offers a handy overview of US/UK relations (not always particularly warm) after World War II.

If this isn't the dumbest column written by James Travers, it's certainly in his top/bottom five.  Any time a Toronto Star columnist unleashes the hoary "speak truth to power" invocation, you might as well keep rolling your eyes until you've moved on to the next bit of cliched bluster by the next columnist over.  But it's worth reading to the very end, wherein we are blessed to discover that Liberal foreign policy is actually "Canada's default character", so I guess it's nice to learn that I'm somehow deficiently Canadian.

I cannot possibly convey to you how badly I wanted to be a ninja when I was a kid.  Grady Hendrix traces the pop culture history of that mysterious discipline and hits most of the high notes that drove my own aspirations ("the GI Joe character and popular toy Snake Eyes was originally a commando but was quickly rebranded as a ninja when Hasbro realized that this would increase his awesomeness by 40 percent").  Also includes the somewhat startling assertion that "ninjas are basically supercool Jews".  I didn't know that.

"On either side of the comma, past and present each get four syllables".  Examining the "greatest one-liner in movie history".

The perils of landing a book deal.  Leah McLaren makes an appearance.  Provide your own joke, please.

If you're as into roadtrips as I am, you'll love the Simplified Eisenhower Interstate System map.

Stuff You Should Totally Read 06.26.07

The Victims of Communism Memorial was dedicated in Washington, D.C. on June 12, 2007.  The US President spoke at the dedication, as did the Democrat chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, to a crowd of one thousand.  You almost undoubtedly didn't hear about it.  There's a reason for that, and it speaks volumes about one institution in particular.  (hat tip: Flea)

As Michael Geist notes, two IP bills received Royal Assent just before Parliament shut down for the summer.  As Geist also notes, Bill C-59, which provides for anti-camcording provisions to be added to the Criminal Code of Canada, managed to receive due consideration (meaning introduction, debate and all three votes) by the House of Commons in less than eighty minutes.  Total time from introduction to Royal Assent - fewer than twenty days.  Now that is some lobbying muscle.  Wouldn't it be nice if issues that actually mattered received the same level of concentrated effort from our legislatures?

General rule for survival: don't mess with anyone that has a tattoo on their face.  So, and I cannot emphasize this enough, do not f*** with this guy.

I still haven't gotten around to reading any of his long-form fiction, but this spectacularly long post by scifi guy Dan Simmons (the "June-July 2007 Message from Dan" - he doesn't believe in permalinks, evidently) about US options (such as they are) in Iraq is by turns informative, funny and depressing.

This Slate Explainer (unintentionally) helps explain why political polling is so frequently so useless.

Another milestone in the pristine history of modern journalism - evidently there's just one angry Muslim out there (via Hitchens, who has his own piece worth reading).

Jackson Diehl on the UN Human Rights Council (hat tip: Daimnation!)

Dawg talks about spanking children (as a legal matter - get your mind out of the gutter), which promptly erupts into a rather robust comments thread.

Stuff You Should Totally Read 06.25.07

Climate change hits home: "the Jack Daniels distillery in Lynchburg, Tenn., has warned it may have to reduce or suspend production, because the iron-free spring waters on which it relies are flowing as much as two-thirds below normal".  Seriously, though, John Ibbitson has marred what is basically a really interesting story (thirty year drought cycles in the southern and southwestern US coupled with millions of new residents in a region really not intended to bear quite that many) by trying (and failing miserably) to shoehorn it into the Globe's predetermined climate change reporting agenda.  Ignore all the stuff about how this all might be a function of global warming (a point even Ibbitson is forced to concede), and marvel at how the most dynamic region in the US is running out of water.

Damian Penny has some great pictures of icebergs off the coast of Newfoundland.

Er... okay - The history of the Soviet Union had fewer black pages in its history than certain other countries, not least the US, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said in a speech.

Steve Lefsetz reviews the current albums on the Billboard Top 100 which have sold more than one million copies.  As Lefsetz notes (caps his), Carrie Underwood has the "BIGGEST SELLING RECORD ON THE CHART!"  Her only competition?  Nickelback.  Lordy.

I would have thought that this announcement by Lawrence Lessig, one of the key popular writers on the intersection of technology and intellectual property, would have been slightly bigger news.  Shorter Lessig: he's not going to be writing about the stuff which made him (sort of) famous anymore.

Benjamin Wittes writes in TNR about "declining institutional confidence" in the US Supreme Court.  Wittes cites the increasingly political tone and ideological divides on the court as the proximate causes - perhaps something for the Canadian Supremes to bear in mind?