Skip to content

Category Archives: farce

Vote splitting

Vote splitting crucial : NDP strength swung Liberal votes to Tories The first returns suggest the rising support for the NDP has drawn enough votes to allow the Tories to capture 13 seats perviously [sic] held by Liberals and one held by the Bloc Québé cois [sic]. Although the Greens saw their popular vote again […]

“Huh. Well, you never know”

The Day the Movies Died For the studios, a good new idea has become just too scary a road to travel. Inception, they will tell you, is an exceptional movie. And movies that need to be exceptional to succeed are bad business. “The scab you’re picking at is called execution,” says legendary producer Scott Rudin […]

Puck teasing

The Confessions Of A Former Adolescent Puck Tease But there was to be no life-changing climactic scene at my hockey game, no angry announcements by Au Revoire, no black roses thrown out on the ice, no outbursts or outings or murders. What happened was, when we came out from the locker room to start the […]

“This cannot possibly be right”

Did somebody just try to buy the British government? I have come to the absolute conclusion that foundation X [sic] is completely genuine and sincere and that it directly wishes to make the United Kingdom one of the principal points that it will use to disseminate its extraordinarily great wealth into the world at this […]

and yet, the National Post is still worse

Reinstate Rick Salutin << Murray Dobbin's Blog That the Globe would fire him is indicative of the final stage of the Canadian political and economic elite’s betrayal of the country’s traditions and values. It’s all just business now and anything that isn’t business – certainly anything that questions it’s “natural” dominance – is simply dispensable. […]

Derivatives

Johann Hari – How Goldman Sachs gambled with the world’s poor – and won There are some smaller explanations that account for some of the price rise, but not all. It’s true the growing demand for biofuels was gobbling up much-needed agricultural land – but that was a gradual process that wouldn’t explain a violent […]

New horizons in bullshitting

Ex-Harvard student accused of living a lie – The Boston Globe “I was just knocked silly by this,’’ said one Harvard professor, speaking on condition of anonymity, who likened Wheeler’s fabrications to a scenario from the film “The Talented Mr. Ripley.’’ “There’s something that’s pathological there. And it’s something that seems to me that needs […]

This lacks the ring of truth

Male pattern baldness and the mysteries of human sexuality are no puzzles for the president of Bolivia, who has declared they are caused by eating chicken.

Patents are bogus: another reason

What If The Very Theory That Underlies Why We Need Patents Is Wrong? [The paper] looks at the putative theory that innovation comes from a direct profit motive of a single corporation looking to sell the good in market, and for that to work, the company needs to take the initial invention and get temporary […]

TV

Clay Shirky: The Collapse of Complex Business Models There are two essential bits of background here. The first is that most TV is made by for-profit companies, and there are two ways to generate a profit: raise revenues above expenses, or cut expenses below revenues. The other is that, for many media business, that second […]