Podcasts

The Roundtable Podcast 62

February 23, 2014 Wayne K. Spear 3 Comments

• Week of 23.02.2014

“It is what is is”: Patrick Brazeau Has a New Job | Yulia Tymoshenko freed; Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovich impeached | Pa. couple sent to prison for 2nd prayer death of child | Blondie Bennett, Barbie-Obsessed Woman, Uses Hypnotherapy To Make Herself ‘Brainless’ | New Music: Lake Street Dive, “Bad Self Portraits” | Blue Tooth Toothbrush | WhatsApp | Viral Drinking Game, NekNomination | Tim Hortons cuts back menu, drops Cold Stone Creamery | Harper Goes to Mexico | Federal research shows oil sands tailings ponds are leaking | The government wants to hear your views about prostitution

Download entire podcast (320 kbps mp3) | Visit The Roundtable on Facebook.

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Wayne's Picks, Writers and Writing

The Case for Olympic Writing

February 22, 2014 Wayne K. Spear Leave a comment

racing

I ASK MYSELF: if writing were an Olympic sport, who would be its 2014 gold medalist? Alas, we may never know. Of course, we are free to speculate, and that can be good fun. Would it be Mark Helprin? J.K. Rowling? The (help me out here) Fifty Shades of Grey person? Malcolm Gladwell?

Personal Essay

Life Lessons from WhatsApp

February 21, 2014 Wayne K. Spear 1 Comment

HERE AND THERE, you’ll come upon a real-world story that is at-once inspiring, improbable, crazy, ironic, incredible – and that almost didn’t work out in the perfect way that it did. It’s not just rare, it’s Donald Trump good hair day rare. It’s me being told by my partner to pick up three things at the corner store and not forgetting two of them rare.

This, my friend, is the story of Jan Koum, inventor of WhatsApp.

Wayne's Picks, Writers and Writing

A Pleasure to Meet You, Ideal Reader

February 20, 2014 Wayne K. Spear 2 Comments

Reading

I WAS ASKED the other day who I imagined my ideal reader to be. “Well,” I answered – “I hadn’t really thought about that.” Not exactly a stellar reply, I know. Of course I had a half-formed, all-wispy-like inkling of my readers. Tween girls, not on the list. Marxist-Leninists? Not so much. The Nobel Literature Prize Review Board and the editors of Vanity Fair? Hell yes … one day. Well, now I’m curious – just who is my IDEAL reader?

Toronto

If the Ford Brothers Win

February 20, 2014 Wayne K. Spear Leave a comment

1327682983054_ORIGINAL

THE FORD BROTHERS seem confident of an autumn electoral victory, and they’ve good reasons. Rob Ford has admitted to lying to the public, and his lack of self control and dignity have become matters of non-controversy: yet he remains in office and enjoys a healthy approval rating, as well as a credible prospect of a second term. His powers and office budget have been reduced, yet the Fords are as bombastic and arrogant as ever. Both Doug and Rob are uninterested in – indeed, hostile towards – public policy and the workings of government. Their contempt of politicians and the political process constitutes a good portion of the duo’s appeal. After all that has transpired, it is difficult to imagine the scandal that might end their political careers. Could it be that there is no such scandal? The Ford brothers behave exactly as people who believe that it could.

First Nations

Even Tobacco is Better than Stephen Harper’s Law and Order

February 19, 2014 Wayne K. Spear Leave a comment

Contraband Tobacco

Much of the Indian Country coffee-shop chat in southern Ontario these days concerns Ottawa’s Bill C-10, “Tackling Contraband Tobacco Act,” introduced by the Canadian Government in November 2013. Vocal champions of this bill (apart from the government) include the Canadian Convenience Stores Association and the Retail Council of Canada. So a more plainly descriptive title for this legislation might be “A Bill to Prevent the Mohawks from Cutting Into Our Business.”

Religion

When 2+2=5. Or, When Religion Goes Too Far

February 17, 2014 Wayne K. Spear 1 Comment

Screen Shot 2014-02-17 at 2.28.40 PM

YOU MAY ALREADY have seen the video “Watch Creationists Talking About Creationism” – but if you haven’t, here it is for your viewing pleasure.

And now that you’ve seen it, a quick primer on the business of epistemology – otherwise known as the study of knowledge systems.

Podcasts

The Roundtable Podcast 61

February 15, 2014 Wayne K. Spear Leave a comment

• Week of 09.02.2014

cozycamp4-large

Old People News: the 50-Year Anniversary of the Beatles’ Ed Sullivan Appearance | Philip Seymour Hoffman 1967-2014 | (Yet) More Rob Ford | Bangladesh factory owners surrender after 2012 fire that killed 112 | Featured Article of the Week: The Olympics: A lie we all tell ourselves | Subway to remove chemical from bread | Industrial band Skinny Puppy demand $666,000 after music is used in Guantánamo torture | Iranian poet and peace campaigner Hashem Shaabani hanged for ‘waging war against God’ | Scientifically Accurate Flintstones | Woody Allen | Mandy Goes Ice Fishing | New Music: Guided By Voices | Sloe Gin | Moist, Gotye, and other forms of torture

Download entire podcast (320 kbps mp3) | Visit The Roundtable on Facebook.

Religion

The ayatollah’s fatwa on Salman Rushdie, 25 years old and just as evil

February 14, 2014 Wayne K. Spear Leave a comment

Salman Rushdie

ON FEBRUARY 14, 1989, precisely twenty-five years ago, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini called upon “all brave Muslims of the world” to murder the apostate Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses, a novel condemned as blasphemous. Less noted was the breadth of the fatwa, which included:

First Nations

Give the First Nations Education Act a Chance

February 10, 2014 Wayne K. Spear 1 Comment

aboriginal-education

THE ISRAELI DIPLOMAT, orator and polyglot, Abba Eban, is today memorialized in the truism that men and nations behave wisely only once they have exhausted all the other alternatives. In the case of Canada’s exhausted Indian Act policies, the alternatives to a wiser course have been many as well as durable, as we all know. Thus it is with surprise, and enthusiasm even, that the Assembly of First Nations is this week absorbing Canada’s late acceptance of the five “Conditions for the Success of First Nations Education,” enunciated in the AFN’s December 2013 unanimous resolution and enshrined in Finance Minister Flaherty’s 2014 budget. These conditions are as follows:

Canada, Politics

Julian Fantino’s blundering career is past its best before date

January 29, 2014 Wayne K. Spear Leave a comment

Julian Fantino

IT CAN BE no mere coincidence that Julian Fantino’s 2007 hardboiled memoir, Duty: The Life of a Cop, is an as-told-to composed by the PR consultant Jerry Amernic – a self-described “developer and executor” of “strategic public relations programs designed to introduce an organization to the media and make them media-friendly.” If there is anyone currently warming an Ottawa cabinet seat who requires a media makeover, that person is Julian Fantino.

Podcasts

The Roundtable Podcast 59

January 19, 2014 Wayne K. Spear Leave a comment

• Week of 12.01.2014

dried-cockroach

Ariel Sharon | York University standing by choice to excuse student from group work with women over religious beliefs | Stephen Harper’s ’24 Seven’ Show Has North Korean Vibes | Featured Article: Explaining White Privilege to a Broke White Person | How the Harper Government Committed a Knowledge Massacre | Music: Thee Silver Mt. Zion, “Take Away These Early Grave Blues” | Ont. Nazi’s Hitler-inspired house at centre of family feud | The KKK in Ontario: Found documents tell of Klan activity 90 years ago | Satanic Temple unveils 7-foot goat-headed Baphomet statue for Oklahoma Capitol | China’s new ‘secret ingredient’: cockroaches | App lets business users send messages that self-destruct

Download entire podcast (320 kbps mp3) | Visit The Roundtable on Facebook.

First Nations

Listening to the Survivors of the Indian Residential Schools

January 15, 2014 Wayne K. Spear 1 Comment

Indian residential schools

I encourage you if you have never done so to seek out and talk to survivors of the Indian residential schools

THE REPULSIVE St. Anne’s Indian Residential School at Fort Albany is again in the news. Ontario’s Superior Court Judge Paul Perell has ruled that files in the possession of the Ontario Provincial Police, related to their investigation of crimes at this institution, should be turned over to the courts. These files are critical to the advancement of a case involving former school inmates. The term inmates, by the way, was in fact used by Indian residential school staff in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: people were less circumspect in those days. Here’s a direct quote from an Indian Affairs Annual Report of December 31, 1888:

Of the children who formerly attended the now abandoned day school on Little Child’s Reserve, No. 73, at Crooked Lakes, 27 have become inmates of the industrial school at Fort Qu’Appelle, and 34 of the semi-industrial boarding-school at Round Lake.

First Nations

Face It: Indian Residential Schools Were Bad

January 13, 2014 Wayne K. Spear 20 Comments

Indian Residential Schools
LAST WEEK, Paul Russell (the letters editor at the National Post) ran a piece entitled Could it be that residential schools weren’t so bad?:

The National Post has carried many stories about [Indian residential schools] before and since that apology. And every time we do, it is interesting to see that most of the letters we receive argue that the schools have been unfairly portrayed in the media. That phenomenon was on display again this week, following the publication of last Saturday’s story, “4,000 Children died in residential schools; Truth commission.”