iMatt :: The Blog of Matt Clare

Mr. Chretien, this is your future:

If you keep trying to scuttle this inquiry, and it is proven that you sunk millions of public money into Liberal trinkets for Quebecers, than your legacy will be re-written.

One thing Mr. Chretien’s new legacy might have in common with his old is that they will both prove expensive for Canadians.

UPDATE: Good on Mr. Chretien. He may infact be culpable in all of this, but he was never dircetly culpable. Plus his little golf ball demonstration [Globe and Mail] was very well done and a good response to Judge Gomery’s comments that the golf balls Chretien had made were “Small town cheap”. Chretien produced golf balls with the signatures of world leaders and one from the law firm Judge Gomery’s daughter works for.

My web site used to get along pretty well with Google. They searched my web site a lot and I gaind some pretty good rankings. I couls just mention some one I know in my blog…. say…. Chris Court A.K.A. Monkey, and pretty soon I was the number one Google result for that person.

Well now that MSN has revamped their search engine it’s been getting a little greedy. As per this thread over on , the bot which Microsoft uses to index the world’s web pages appears to needlesly index all kinds of content.

Some one asked Yahoo the question “How will the next Pope be chosen?” What I’m wondering is how will it be covered?

Should Jean-Paul the second die, and it will be soon, then a conclave will be held and a the Cardinals will hold a secret ballet to elect the new Pontiff. The ballots are burned after each vote, and if the vote is unsuccessful, a substance is added to the fire to produce black smoke. When the black smoke goes up then we all know the voting goes on, if it’s white then we have a new pope. I don’t really know how good a signal this is, because there is no good footage from the seventies of Jean-Paul’s selection – but that won’t be the case this time.

MILLIONS OF DOLLARS are spent each year by the CNNs, NBCs, BBCs, Reuters of the world to gain the rights to roof tops in rome that over look the Vatican city so that reporters can cover this event. Millions of dollars spent, in the hopes that the Pope will die and one news agency will have the best shot. Something has always bothered me about these investments in someone’s death.

Likewise, we will/have start/ed seeing news packages about Pope Jean-Paul the second, packages that have been ready for years, and checked and updated by interns over the summer. They’ll talk about when he was shot, his other health scares, what he did for the homles of Eastern Europe, and the contraception based protection from AIDS that the pope prevents from reaching Africa.

In the same way that five minute news packages were ready for the death of Johny Carson and Peier Burtton, packages are ready for every important person near deaths door. Imagine a phone call out of the blue “Hello Y, could you give me a few comments about X” “X is a great person, why do you ask” “Oh, we’re preparing for when he’s dead”.

It’s almost perverse. Vultures teat death with more dignity.

I for one would prefer that we not be prepared. Was Princes Diana’s death covered so poorly? The gaggle of press seem to be getting all the coverage they need from their encampment infront of the hospital in Rome – though they likely scoped that location out a while ago.

One more rant about the Vatican: They Vatican post office is incredably slow! When in Rome, send your mail like the Romans.

On Thursday Jan 27th Kronos Quartet did a sold-out concert and Brock University.

I got into Kronos because I’ve always liked strings and because they’ve worked with so many amazing artists. In fact, David Harrington DJed an hour of some of his favourite music over the lunch hour. It was a smattering of American classics and pop from around the world, including some very interesting Japanese music. Apparently he travels with at least 300 CDs while on tour, and it’s certainly not all classical.

The concert itself was very sonic. The final performance, On Scared Ground, just sounded amazing. It actually sounded a lot like the industrial/String mix of the tracks DJ Spooky and The Freight Elevator recorded. I’ve been combing the iTunes music store and the P2P networks to get a copy of it, but no luck so far.

If I’ve peaked your interest check out the Requiem for a Dream soundtrack or one of there better recent releases, Ghost Opera, which has a Japanese flavour to it.

Mr. Bush was inaugurated yesterday, and as he swore into the office he wasn’t the only person on this planet swearing about his second term.

I am looking forward to the inauguration of Viktor Yushchenko on Saturday [Globe]. At least when Ukrainian elections have suspicious outcomes they hold new ones. Mr. Bush should take note of what happened in the Ukraine, and the recent peace deal in the Sudan [Mail & Guardian, South Africa].

This, Mr. Bush, is what freedom looks like when it is on the march, it’s not just about words.

So while the rest of the world tries to solve it’s problems without America’s help, and despite it’s interference, Mr. Bush presents us a speech in which he says the word freedom 25 times, and liberty 17.