On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

From the Guardian: Mark Ruffalo - yes, the actor - on his visit to Standing Rock, ND. Interesting sidebar he mentions in passing: there's a Navajo-based company making solar panels.

Same newspaper: Apparently, there's a fight going on within the FBI over the 2016 USA presidential election at the moment.

On surveillance in Canada: Montréal police vs. journalists on the one hand (with commentary on the matter coming from, among others, Edward Snowden via videolink to McGill University), and CSIS accumulating metadata on a second hand. We'll assume there's additional arms waiting to be revealed, although I don't expect a reveal of HYDRA-style plotters behind any of our scenes. If anyone in Ottawa raises anything akin to the Skull and Tentacles on a flagpole anywhere near Parliament Hill, that will be a real shock. (Also, Disney will unleash something more fearsome than any army upon the perpetrators: intellectual property lawyers. And that will be the end of that scheme.)

Speaking of actors again: Emma Watson and a bunch of accomplices are trying to get conversations about literature going via the London Underground. I think we have enough notable authors scattered across Ottawa-Gatineau and beyond in both official languages and a couple of indigenous languages as well to get something similar going as well once the expansion of the O-Train network is truly underway. Mark Bourrie, the Ladies' Killing Circle, Jay Odjick, Marie Bilodeau, S.M. Carriere, Alex Binkley  and I expect there are others I'm forgetting (but not ed_rex!)...and as for actors? We're growing that community, too.

On street names: Remember Ottawa's Central Park district near the Experimental Farm, with streets named in a New York theme? As a comics fan, I was tickled to see one of those side streets named for Gotham, but the people who live on Trump Avenue are getting annoyed at the heightened notoriety. The people running Ashcroft Development and Ottawa City Hall at the time the development was first approved might have some belated second thoughts about the naming, no? "Hillary" as an alternative, however, is already taken by a street in the Guildwood Estates area.

Update 5 Nov. 2022: Well, that remark about the Skull-and-Tentacles flag of HYDRA aged really well in the past half-decade and change since then, didn't it?

CANCON-2012 Flyer Design, a photo by dwight_ew on Flickr.

A little bit of portfolio stuff re: an upcoming event...

• The Border by James Laxer. Dealing with US/Canadian relations in the border communities in particular, both the long-term history and with some detailed focus on the post-9/11/2001 period.


• The Shadow of Saganami by David Weber. Part of the "Honorverse" collection of space opera novels set in the worlds of Honor Harrington, but not focused primarily on Honor herself. Weber's been finding more and more tangential characters and ideas set in those worlds that interest him in the last couple of years. Not a bad thing, I'm thinking.


• The Last Good Day by Gail Bowen. A Joanne Kilbourn mystery. These novels are largely set in various parts of Saskatchewan, where I spent a fair chunk of my youth. Hence at least part of the series' charm for me.


• Saskatchewan: A New History by Professor Bill Waiser. One of the things I happily credit Will Ferguson for is igniting a real interest in my own country's history. Between that general interest and the focus on my old home province here, I found myself faced with an irresistable combination.


• It's the Crude, Dude! (2nd Edition) by Linda McQuaig. You may or may not agree with her thinking or her conclusions on the whole WorldWide Oil Mess and US involvement in it, but I'd recommend at least borrowing it from your local library for a week or two to mull over the contents and conclusions.