Small Fry.

Time for a little after election analysis. But I'm not going to talk about the 3 major parties. After all half the bloggers in Saskatchewan will be writing about what a Sask. Party win means, how much longer will Lorne Calvert and David Karwacki hang on and so forth. Instead I'll make a few comments on the "minor" parties in this election.

The Green Party of Saskatchewan was the most ambitious of these. They ran candidates in 48 of the 58 ridings. If they could somehow have magically transfered their votes into one riding they might have actually won a seat. Unfortunately this of course is not possible, and instead they came in last place in most ridings. So their breakthrough to elected party status is still at least an election away. My guess is that it's going to be longer than that given the polarisation of politics here. If the Liberals can't even elect their own leader the Greens are going to need even more luck to make it to the legislature.

There is often talk of election reform when discussing parties like the Greens, as using systems like proportional representation makes it easier for such parties to take a seat. But given that according to their own website they apparently got 2 percent of the popular vote it seems unlikely they would have elected a member even under PR, which usually has a minimum number of votes to take a seat in the range of 5 percent.

Nothing says "single issue party" like the name Saskatchewan Marijuana Party. I'm sure it comes as no surprise that their major interest is in legalising marijuana. They managed to run a grand total of five candidates, none of whom came close to winning a seat. Frankly their issue isn't one that's likely to generate much voter interest. Voters are much more concerned with what the government will do with the provincial finances, health care, and the highways than whether or not they can toke up. I can't see them ever running a full slate of candidates, or even coming near to doing so.

The Western Independence Party of Saskatchewan managed to run eight candidates. But I doubt their goal of Western Canadian separation from Canada is any more popular than legalising marijuana. In fact I assume the reverse is the case. In any case the chances of them electing anyone to office are pretty much nil. Western separatism has waxed and waned over the years, but it's fair to say that Saskatchewan has not been one of it's strongholds. I won't be at all surprised if the WIP isn't around by the next election given the short shelf life similar parties have had in the past.

The ghost of elections past in this election was the Progressive Conservative Party of Saskatchewan. For the first time since the 1995 election they ran candidates, a slate of five. Even ignoring the small numbers who ran Brad Wall isn't going to be worrying about a challenge from the right anytime soon. The party persists in linking itself to the unpopular Grant Devine era, hardly a recipe for success, and has a leader, Rick Swenson, who doesn't exactly come across as dynamic. I find the attempt on their front page to link the NDP governments of Saskatchewan to Communist governments like those of Cuba and "Korea" amusing. "Red baiting" just reenforces the impression of a party living in the past.

Apparently no independant candidates ran in this election. Or if they did they received no votes, which is exceedingly unlikely. All the minor candidates did receive sufficient votes to indicate that they were voted for by more than their immediate families, which should at least take some of the sting of losing away.

To The Polls.

Today is provincial election day in Saskatchewan, and I've already voted. Even though it was just past 9 I spent a while in line given that apparently others thought they'd beat the rush too by going early. Who did I vote for? None of your beeswax, folks. I can tell you I didn't vote for the Saskatchewan Marijuana Party, which isn't saying much.

Hopefully if you're a Saskatchewan resident and are eligable you're going to vote today, even if it's just to vote for who you least hate, or to keep a candidate you really don't like from winning.

For those interested in the mechanics of voting here we still use paper ballots. You mark your choice in the circle beside their name with an X and that's it. You vote for one candidate. And unlike some parts of the world elections are always on a weekday, never on a Sunday.

Off The Dial.

A long chapter in Canadian radio ended today. The callsign CFQC left Saskatoon's radio airwaves as Hot 93 FM, the current holders of the callsign, became 92.9 The Bull under the call letters CKBL. The original CFQC hit the air on the AM band in the 1920s, broadcasting on 600 khz until February 6th, 1995, when it became Hot 93 on the FM band. CFQC will continue in use on television as the callsign for the local CTV affiliate, which retained them even after the ownership of the radio station changed in the 1980s.

Although I didn't listen to Hot 93 it's sad that CFQC has been replaced. One of the earliest Canadian radio callsigns is now gone, assuming of course someone doesn't attempt to have it reassigned to them, although I would suspect if it is reused it may not be in the Saskatoon market.

Halloween Danger.

No, it's not weirdos sticking things into treats. No, it's not worrying about kids getting hit by cars as they canvass the neighbourhood. It's the danger to your waistline. Admit it, unless you hate candy you're going to eat some of stuff you bought, if you haven't already. And since it tends to come in mini packages it makes it easier to say "Oh, just one more won't hurt," and before you know it you've eaten the equivalent of two or three chocolate bars at one shot. So beware, or when next Halloween rolls around you'll be able to pull off that Dom Deluise costume you've been thinking about without padding.

To Gor Or Not To Gor.

It seems that Dark Horse may still be planning to release it's Gor omnibus. Or maybe they aren't. It certainly won't be appearing November 15 as originally planned, and a visit to Dark Horse's website by me trying to find out when the next Blade of the Immortal collection will be released(in February, if you're wondering) turned up no hint of a new release date.

Shop 'Til You Drop.

This week Saskatoon City Council announced it will no longer regulate store hours in Saskatoon. This comes on the heels of requests by several stores, including Wal Mart, for permission to remain open 24 hours a day during December in the run up to Christmas. The way things are going the only days the majority of stores will be closed are Christmas Day and Easter Sunday, and I wouldn't count on everyone following this informally agreed upon prohibition for long.

Personally I've long thought the best way to regulate store hours would be to allow stores to be open whenever they want, but mandate they must be closed for a specifc number of days per year. Want to open on Christmas Day? Go ahead, but it means you'll have to be shut up for some other day of the year. Such a method would be fair to everyone as no one would feel pressured to close for holidays they don't follow, and employees would be assured of a set number of days off along with their manditory vacation time.

It's Not Just For Dogs.

Yes folks, we finally have evidence that it's not just dogs who play poker as that classic painting indicates. The cats are in on it too. Hmm, that may explain the way some people play online, they're actually cats.

The Future of Saskatoon Rentals?

(click on the pic for a better look)

With the way things are going this scene might actually happen here in Saskatoon. Large numbers of condo applications are currently under consideration on top of all the conversions of apartment buildings to condos currently going on. Apparently there are no new rental spaces currently planned. You'd think that at some point there would be an oversupply of condos, but even though the Saskatoon real estate market is cooling down slightly apparently there is still lots of demand.

This scene comes from issue 30 of DC Comics Nightwing. The lovely young lady is Bridget Clancy, who was Dick Grayson's landlady at the time. Clancy was born in Hong Kong but adopted by an Irish couple as a baby, hence her "lookin' like Kowloon and talkin' like Londonderry" as she told Dick when he first got a look at her actual face.

Half Time.

I'm there.

Lament For Larry.

The Colorado Rockies are off to the World Series. Too bad they couldn't have done this a few years ago when Larry Walker was still with the team. Of course the real letdown for Walker and Canadian baseball fans was the 1994 baseball strike, which occured while Walker was with the Montreal Expos. There was a very good chance that year that Monteal would have been in the World Series, and having a prominent Canadian player on a Canadian based team in what would have been the third World Series in a row to take place in Canada would have been a dream come true. Instead the strike not only prevented that from happening, but lead to moves that ultimately began the long death of the franchise.

Deaf Ears.

I mentioned in a recent post my nostalgic revisting of shortwave radio. After that I dug out my old receiver and have been taking the occasional listen, such as tonight. But tonight is not a good night to tune the bands. Propagation is terrible right now, so there is little to hear. We're at the low point of the sunspot cycle, and at such times shortwave radio propagation is at it's weakest, and tonight reflects that. Unlike local AM and FM broadcasts shortwave broadcasts, even from the most powerful transmitters aimed directly at you, are not guarenteed listening. You can turn on a familiar frequency at the right time and hear nothing. I wonder how many receivers have been returned over the years by newcomers who didn't realise this and thought their new radios were broken.

I switched to the longwave band, and did hear what sounded like voices. But it soon became obvious this was a mixing product, a false signal created by two strong signals mixing in the receiver's circuitry. After all local talk show host John Gormley isn't heard on longwave, and it would be a miracle to hear a broadcast station from those parts of the world that do have longwave broadcasting on the ferrite antenna in a shortwave portable in the middle of North America. In North America longwave is limited to navigation beacons.

My radio is a circa 1991 example of the Sangean ATS803a. This receiver was one of the most popular units of the late '80s and early '90s due to its reasonable price to performance ratio. Not only was it sold under the Sangean name but also as the Radio Shack Realistic DX440 and several other lesser known names. I remember reading at one point the suggestion that the '803a, and its predecessor the '803 were based on Sony's ICF 2001. You can read one take on the '803a here.

If you blog and play poker...

...this may be of interest to you.

I have registered to play in the PokerStars World Blogger Championship of Online Poker!

This Online Poker Tournament is a No Limit Texas Holdem event exclusive to Bloggers.

Registration code: 5702565

Last year's edition is what got me playing poker. Hopefully I'll do quite a bit better this year.

Public Versus Private

Seems I've been a bit lax of late, as this is my first submission to blogland in a week. I have in fact been doing some writing the past few days, but it's something that will not see any sort of public release, as it's strictly for my entertainment. (I'm sure there is someone someplace who might actually like it, but pretty much everyone else wouldn't.) On the other hand I'm hoping this will help me get certain other writing projects back into action.

Whither Hollywood North?

The growing strength of the Canadian dollar, which briefly reached parity with the US dollar today and may soon stay at or surpass parity, may be good news for consumers. But its a major problem for export oriented industries, such as the motion picture and television industries.

The weakness of the Canadian dollar versus the US dollar prompted a huge growth in the filming of projects by American studios in Canada from the mid '80s onward. Not only did they gain the advantage of each US dollar going that much farther in Canada they had a access to a workforce that spoke English with an accent that could pass for American and filming locations that could be transformed into American settings with just a bit of prop work. But the rising Canadian dollar has chopped those advantages in recent years, and the industry is already seeing a slowing down of American projects. With the Canadian dollar reaching parity the fear is that existing projects won't be replaced by new ones.

It also has the potential to hurt production for the Canadian domestic market as well. American programs tend to generate the highest ratings in the Canadian market, and are cheaper to buy than a Canadian production. The strengthening Canadian dollar will exacerbate this problem, as American programs become even cheaper for Canadian networks to buy, and this is likely to strengthen the resistance by Canadian broadcasters to putting money into more Canadian made programming. It is also likely to hurt foreign sales of material originally made for the Canadian market.

Some connected with Hollywood have in recent years complained about Canadian productions taking work from them, often accusing Canadian jurisdictions of unfair subsidisation. But the hit Canadian production may take from the strong dollar may not benefit them as it might have in the past, as there are more American jurisdictions making their own efforts to attract productions.

Links Updated.

I've just made a minor update to my link listing. Randy McDonald has decided to rename his Livejournal A Bit More Detail, and now the link to it reflects that change. I also decided to sort them alphabetically, at least for now.

Goodbye SFN.

I received an e-mail today announcing that the Saskatoon Free-Net will cease its e-mail service on December 31st and will shut down all remaning online activities by June 1st of next year. Frankly I'm surprised the SFN stayed active this long. The ever increasing number of Canadians with things like high speed internet service, free e-mail sites with gigantic caches of memory per user, and the growth of blogging made the SFN pretty much obsolete. It had become little more than an e-mail hosting service in recent years, and presumably has seen less and less traffic as fewer and fewer people made financial contributions. But I'm sure many Saskatonians will be a bit sad to see it go as it was their first access to the Internet. It certainly was for me. The only good thing about it fading away is that a bunch of losers who have my SFN e-mail address in their spam lists will get it all bounced back at them for a while.

Sony Canada Says No To Shortwave.

Back in the early '90s I did quite a bit of shortwave listening. Once the Internet came along it began to suck away my time, and that, combined with the noise that the computer generates when I have it on, resulted in my receiver becoming largely a clock radio. But of late I've been interested in picking up a cheapy shortwave or two for some audio mangling, and that got me poking around online tonight for info them. I spent a good time here reading receiver reviews getting a bit nostalgic for the hobby again. But when I visited a couple of Canadian dealers that offer shortwave receivers for sale I noticed that neither carry Sony products. Curious, I checked out Sony's Canadian site. To my surprise nothing was to be found. Sony has long been in the shortwave biz, with some of their portables having reached legendary status in the hobby, such as the ICF2010. Apparently Sony has discontinued most of its shortwave product line, but a look at the US Sony site showed the SW7600GR was still available in the US. I guess Sony Canada wasn't getting enough demand for those products to keep even one model in stock.

Unhappy Breakaway Day!

If you live in the universe in which Space: 1999 is set today is the eighth anniversary of the Moon being blown out of orbit. Its funny to think of watching the series when I was 8 and 9 and the year 1999 seeming to be so far away. And here I am, writing this and the year 1999 is 8 years ago! Slow or fast, before you know it the years slip by.

The series arrived at both a fortunate and an unfortunate time. Fortunate because when in first aired in the fall of 1975 there was little competition, with Star Trek being limited to syndicated reruns and very little new science fiction being available. Unfortunate because it arrived a year too early, with the series being cancelled and the last episodes being aired in many markets just as Star Wars appeared to launch the late '70s sci fi boom, a boom that the series wouldn't be able to take full advantage of.

Public Stupidity.

Today there were a couple of protesters in front of Saskatoon City Hall. "911 Was An Inside Job!" stated the sign carried by one. Having other things to do I didn't bother to get closer and find out what version of the theory they believed in. Not that it really matters, the theories that have been widely publicised are all equally full of holes and far more baroque than any credible "the US gubmint did it!' theory needs to be. Whoever these people were they apparently aren't making much of an impact if only two of them showed up. And why they would be out there protesting in the first place is beyond me. The City of Saskatoon has no influence on or connection with Canadian foreign policy.

Joe Zawinul, RIP

Unfortunate news to report. Austrian jazz great Joe Zawinul has died at 75 in a Vienna hospital. Zawinul was one of the most influential European jazz musicians of the post war period. During his stint with Cannonball Adderley in the 1960s he wrote the hit "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy" and was an early exponent of the use of electric piano in jazz. He was a participant in the late '60s Miles Davis sessions that resulted in the pioneering jazz fusion albums In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew, writing the title cut of the former and contributing the (then) album side long cut "Pharoah's Dance" to the latter. In the 1970s he formed the group Weather Report with veteran tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter, which saw considerable success and saw Zawinul as one of the early and major promoters of synthesizers in jazz. He remained musically active until his recent hospital stint, having toured earlier this year with his current group, and having recently appeared as the cover story in Downbeat magazine.