On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

I was going to explore my reactions to Star Trek: Discovery(AKA "DSC") in greater depth, and you may expect that later in this entry. For the moment, a surprising bit of news from closer to home arrived this morning: Rick Mercer's announcement that the Mercer Report will be closing up shop at the end of what will be its fifteenth season CBC Television.

Allow me to share his announcement via his own recording...



I admit that I see this as another sign of something akin to a Canadian Apocalypse. Some of you who've been watching this weblog for a while will be making informed deductions and/or guesses as to what some of the other signs are.

I'm not happy. But it's Rick's choice to make. Not mine. Not CBC's.

Okay, on to DSC.

What we ended up getting on Sunday night, after delays thanks to CBS' contractual obligations to the NFL impacting on BellMedia's obligations to CBS, was the first two episodes of DSC. Aired back to back, with "The Vulcan Hello" followed immediately by "Battle at the Binary Stars". Together they form what you might call either a prologue or a full Act One of the first season's larger story.

Without giving away too much, it's a good setup for whatever else we're about to get this year.

I'm still getting over my bout of design history dissonance considering this is supposed to be happening about a year after the events of "The Cage" and ten years before "Where No Man Has Gone Before". The uniforms, the user interface designs, the starship architecture...all seem a bit out of place with those two episodes of the original series. We're being promised explanations and evolution over time, to be sure. How fast the production team delivers is up to them. Our reactions to that speed - or the lack of it - are up to us.

Just about everything else: the scripts, the performances of the live actors, the visual effects work...all meet my hopes.

That visual dissonance remains. For now, anyway.

One bit of advice to CBS and its production partners: please show the episode titles in the episode itself.

Still. Not. Normal.

Devyn Barrie for OttawaStart.com asks: When it comes to police (in Ottawa), whose jurisdiction is it anyway? And it took a beaver on a freeway to get them asking.

From CBC's Sunday Edition: Michael Enright on the Gumpians vs. the Trumpians.

If you grow up in a civil service family, everything to do with government comes back to your sense of identity sooner or later. Like it or not, want it or not. You are raised and trained in those terms. Your parents may not even realize it.

I would argue that at least two of our politicians at the federal level in Canada are among many people worthy of our attention and respect for coping with hard situations, even if/when we watch them in the midst of coping with errors strategic and/or tactical.

Ahmed Hussen is our current minister for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship. Erin Andersson and Michelle Zilio filed a piece with the Globe and Mail that gives us a sense of his progress, from Somali refugee to federal cabinet minister.

Chrystia Freeland went from reporter to minister for Global Affairs and International Trade. Being of Ukrainian ancestry and opposed to Russian interventions in her family's old country, that has made her a target for desinformatsiya efforts centered upon her maternal grandfather's role in local media as dictacted by the Nazi regime in Germany during World War II. There are two opinion pieces, one by Paul Wells for the Toronto Star and another by Michael Harris for iPolitics, that frame some of my thinking on the matter.

The situations each of them are now facing will change - at times, dramatically, I expect - in the days and months ahead. But I do believe each of them is working to rise to the challenges of these moments.

I think this counts as good news tonight:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/court-challenges-program-1.3970103

Tonight, CTV - one of the privately-owned TV networks here in Canada - aired Captain America: the Winter Soldier.

I have to wonder about the timing, given the last three months in the real worlds. How long ago would the scheduling choice for this particular night have been made?

So...on Facebook, the Southern Poverty Law Center is referencing a Wall Street Journal article (behind the latter's paywall online) attributing the Inauguration spew - er, speech - to alt-Reichster Stephen Bannon's keyboard. Confirmed in the WSJ hardcopy?

Good morning (Eastern Standard Time), everyone!

rfmcdonald  pointed out a weblog to me years ago that got my attention, called Window on Eurasia. It focuses largely on Russia and her neighbours, which - in the current political context - you might well imagine why people in general might be interested. They may not want to click on the news/opinion/message board links in many cases, particularly the ones ending in *.ru, for the next couple of years...but the material on the blog itself provides some additional context from which to view the situation. Double- and triple-checking is encouraged.

Also, noting from yesterday's Toronto Star, and originally sourced from Andrew Roth at the Washington Post, an article that might suggest worse people than the current management are still a possibility for that country.

More on other topics to follow as the day moves onward.