1 BENGOUGH? BENGOUGH. It’s cattle and Conservative country, where the townsfolk traditionally run people like me out of their sight. But the Gateway Music Festival has attracted Steve Earle and Corb Lund, for starters … holy moly, it appears they have a pretty good lineup.
2 LET IT SNOW (NOT) … I don’t think I’ll be singing that song to my former bosses in Melville, after the former home of Community Publishing (Prairie Dog used to get printed there long ago, but the printing presses shut down in 2008 and most of the printing now gets done in Estevan). The weight of this year’s snow pack caved in the roof yesterday.
3 NATURE OF THE BUSINESS Let’s face it, Melville isn’t the only place where the roof is falling in on the newspaper industry. The Boston Globe’s publisher recently told a conference that his newspaper used to make from $160 to $180 million on classified advertising alone. That’s gone, and thanks to Internet sites such as Monster.com, it ain’t comin’ back.
4 IN OTHER NEWS, MY MOTHER-IN-LAW WONDERS WHERE I GOT THE BLING FOR BUYING HAIR CARE PRODUCTS AT DOLLAR TREE The author of the book Friday Night Lights, Buzz Bissinger, won the Internet a couple of days ago when he wrote in GQ that in order to deal with his sexual dysfunction, he went out and bought clothes. A lot of clothes. A lot of very, very strange clothes unless he’s trying to a second career as a bouncer at a leather bar … “eighty-one leather jackets, seventy-five pairs of boots, forty-one pairs of leather pants, thirty-two pairs of haute couture jeans, ten evening jackets, and 115 pairs of leather gloves.” Buzz is in rehab now, for a mild bipolar disorder. (You mean, somebody can work in journalism and make enough money to afford all that? Who knew?)
5 SAD NEWS I attended the University of Regina in the early 1980s, and shared a Logic 100 class with about 100 others, including Ron Lancaster Jr. The son of Ron Lancaster, and a pretty good CFL coach in his own right, passed away yesterday in his Hamilton apartment at the age of 50.
6 DEFENSE OF GAY MARRIAGE ACT Stephen Colbert launches a freakout after Papa Bear (Bill O’Rielly) goes to play for the other team. In other news, the lawsuits regarding the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Proposition 9 (and how the Supreme Court is probably going to throw them both out) is succinctly and entertainingly explained here. And for the bigots in the crowd … were these quotes made by people opposed to gay marriage or those opposed to inter-racial marriage? And could you tell the difference?
HE’S MAKING IT UP AS HE GOES ALONG Let me get this straight. Brad Wall cuts the Saskatchewan Film and Video Tax Credit, saying that it’s propping up an economically unsustainable industry. Then he tells everybody opposing the decision — even the Saskatchewan Chamber of Commerce — to go pound sand. Then he says the government has studies that show it’s unsustainable. The studies don’t appear to exist, because his government never asked for studies about the film/video tax credit: they only asked for spin doctors to rationalize that decision AFTER the government made the decision. Christ on a crutch, if Wall was any denser we could use him as a sandbag.
YOUR MUSICAL MOMENT OF ZEN PART ONE: The greatest song in the world …
YOUR MUSICAL MOMENT OF ZEN PART TWO: In honour of the Saskatchewan film industry, here’s R.E.M. covering Richard Thompson.
