SOPA Opera

From the CBC, a very telling paragraph that breaks down the great corporate debate over SOPA:

SOPA's backers include the film, recording, media and pharmaceutical industries while internet and technology companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Mozilla, Yahoo and eBay have voiced opposition to the bill.

Ironically, while the issue at hand is ostensibly the ability of individual users to access free, unregulated information and pursue the creative and economic potential of the Web as a genuinely democratic marketplace, the argument has become more about which generation of mega company has the right to profit most off the public.

Even more rich is a Tweet from Rupert Murdoch about "Silicon Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy, plain thievery." This guy trying to take the moral high ground is like George R.R. Martin teasing some kid with a bowtie for being a nerd.

Although they both like speaking on behalf of the righteous mass, the truth is that most of the companies that power the media industry are highly secretive, suspicious, exclusive and run by very  wealthy people who don't spend much time using Wikipedia because they're too busy figuring out how to use the Internet to make money. That, in a nutshell, is why people like this are necessary.

Sideshow Rob

Rob Ford: step right up!

Presumably to distract people from his mess of a city budget, Mayor Rob Ford and his brother Doug have started a campaign to lose weight. What's telling is how the campaign has thus far mixed elements of the spectacle of professional bloodsport with the aesthetic and language of the circus sideshow.

This week, the Fords staged a boxing-style weigh-in at Toronto City Hall. The mayor came in at 330 pounds. "As you all know, over the past year I've worked hard to cut the waste here at city hall," he said. "Now I'd invite all Toronto to join me in cutting a different type of waist." Ford has promised to keep a scale outside his office throughout the campaign, so he and his brother can weigh in once a week, and members of the public can come in and join him in his mission to become slightly less than 300 pounds of fun.

Everything about this screams PR stunt, and as such, it serves as a further indication of how Ford really sees his role as mayor: less a civil servant in charge of the operations of Canada's biggest city, and more a kind of ringmaster, salesman or huckster in the P.T. Barnum mode. He won the election on a platform built from slogans repeated ad nauseam. Now, as his support on city council is beginning to waver, he's resorted to a personal campaign that uses a flippant play on his use of the word "waste" (in Fordspeak, a synonym for city services used by lower income residents), and takes visual cues from the carnival weight-guessing booth, to try and distract voters and media from the train wreck that his regime is turning into.

This should make us all wary, given that the term "mark," meaning a sucker or dupe, comes from the carnival sideshow, where carnies who ran rigged games would mark anyone that fell for the bait by slapping a chalk handprint on their backs, making them easy targets for fellow cheaters.  

Rob Ford seems to believe he can sucker the people of Toronto with a carnival sideshow centered on his big gut. It makes him look like a clown -- as long as we don't fall for it.

At Home with a Housecarl

Welcome, 2012.

Winter is coming. What better time to turn to the grand escape of high fantasy? I spent the waning days of the dead year ranging through the world of Skyrim on my new PS3.

While it's easy to mock RPGs for their nerdiness, I'm continually intrigued by the ways they integrate arcane and archaic language into their storylines. At the moment, my character -- a High Elf called Squiddaro, which seemed like a good name when I was high on coffee, Bailey's and adolescent video game nostalgia -- is traveling with a companion known as a Housecarl. The character is great for helping me take down trolls, but it's the word I love.

According to The Free Dictionary, a Housecarl is "A member of the bodyguard or household troops of a Danish or Anglo-Saxon king or noble." Wikipedia expands, telling us that the word comes from the Old Norse húskarl, meaning "free man." Housecarls from history appear to have performed a variety of administrative and martial tasks in both medieval Scandinavia and Anglo-Saxon England.

Alas, although Lydia has helped me fight giants, dragons and Skeevers, general consensus among the Skyrim fathful is that she is a less than ideal Housecarl, and that I should really be looking to enlist the services of Uthgerd the Unbroken -- "a female warrior with an insatiable lust for violence." A gentle place, Skyrim is not... but then, neither is Toronto in the slush-soaked depths of February.