Answer: I’m getting there.

We don’t yet know the story behind Wilson’s abrupt departure, and I don’t wish to imply otherwise. But even before that news broke Friday, the premier’s ham-fisted attempts to resolve criticism surrounding his expensing of Barristers’ Society dues had me rethinking the issue.

Contrarian’s alter-ego is currently submerged in a writing assignment, so I will merely flag the topic for later elaboration.

Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and with the mothers or families, re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body.

As between Moses, Hitch, Walt, and Sully, Walt gets Contrarian’s vote.

A diesel-powered Pete’s Frootique truck idles unattended on Doyle Street in Halifax Saturday morning, needlessly spilling volatile organic compounds into the crisp spring air.

Update: Contrarian reader Colin May points out: Parked on the wrong side of the street, in a no parking zone, too close to a stop sign. Three strikes and you’re…

Edward Tufte, the “Galileo of Graphics” you introduced us to back in June, refers to images like these as “chartjunk.”

I haven’t taken the time to measure the images you copied (from a committee of physicians who may have had a passing relationship with math sometime in their pasts), but the subsidies pyramid eyeballs closer to a 100-to-1 ratio than the 75-to-25 ratio it is labeled.

Update: A Diligent Reader award goes to Contrarian’s insomniac friend Alistair Watt, who spent time with a ruler and a spreadsheet before concluding that the front faces of the pyramid graphs were a nearly perfect match for the data they purported to represent, but their transformation into three-dimensional pyramids distorted the data severely.

In other words, had this been presented as a column chart or a pie chart, it would have been reasonable. However, when I laboriously calculated the volumes implied by each subsection, the results were dramatically different.

The Halifax Fire Marshall temporarily halted a reading by Alistair MacLeod (standing, back to camera, left side of photo) tonight so the overflow crowd of more than 600 could be rearranged to clear clogged aisles. Officials turned away another 100 people as the 73-year-old MacLeod, who splits his time between Windsor, Ontario, and Dunvegan, Cape Breton, read his 1976 story, The Closing Down of Summer. The Saint Mary’s University event marked the first time MacLeod had publicly read the story in its entirety.

Moneyquote:

When I write a story, when I’m halfway through, I write the last sentence. I think of it as a lighthouse.

The spikes correspond with the three intermissions, and with the immediate aftermath of Crosby’s sudden-death goal and the medal ceremony. Epcor, the company that runs Edmonton’s water system, produced a similar graph for that city on the same afternoon, with the previous day’s spikeless consumption superimposed in green:

Hat tip: R.S.

Ira Glass, host of the great National Public Radio show This American Life, calls OK Go “living catnip.” They direct their own videos, shoot them on shoe-string budgets, and, in the words of singer Damian Kulash, Jr., “we see them as creative works and not as our record company’s marketing tool.”

In a recent New York Time op-ed piece, Kulash explained how OK Go posted its homemade 2006 video, “Here it goes again,” on YouTube without record company EMI’s knowledge or permission, a technical violation of its recording contract. The video won a Grammy, tens of millions of fans saw it, thousands poured into OK Go’s concerts, and EMI made lots of money.

How did the record company react? By pressuring YouTube to curb the viral spread of its videos. Technically, they did this by blocking embedding. Kulash explains after the jump:

Embedded videos — those hosted by YouTube but streamed on blogs and other Web sites — don’t generate any revenue for record companies, so EMI disabled the embedding feature. Now we can’t post the YouTube versions of our videos on our own site, nor can our fans post them on theirs. If you want to watch them, you have to do so on YouTube.

But this isn’t how the Internet works. Viral content doesn’t spread just from primary sources like YouTube or Flickr. Blogs, Web sites and video aggregators serve as cultural curators, daily collecting the items that will interest their audiences the most. By ignoring the power of these tastemakers, our record company is cutting off its nose to spite its face.

The numbers are shocking: When EMI disabled the embedding feature, views of our treadmill video dropped 90 percent, from about 10,000 per day to just over 1,000. Our last royalty statement from the label, which covered six months of streams, shows a whopping $27.77 credit to our account.

Clearly the embedding restriction is bad news for our band, but is it worth it for EMI? The terms of YouTube’s deals with record companies aren’t public, but news reports say that the labels receive $.004 to $.008 per stream, so the most EMI could have grossed for the streams in question is a little over $5,400.

Someone at EMI must read the New York Times, because I was able to embed the new video here. But Kulash’s Times piece is worth reading for insight into the dynamics of Internet content.

Not all record labels react this way. Some 44 million people viewed last year’s wacky YouTube wedding video, JK Wedding Dance Entrance, featuring the Chris Brown song Forever. Brown’s label didn’t insist that YouTube pull the video; they placed an link on the site allowing people to buy the tune on iTunes. Suddenly, as Cory Doctorow explained on Boing-Boing, Suddenly, a year after its original release, Forever rocketed back onto the charts with millions of fresh sales.

Hat tip: SBD.

Around this time of year, I like to dig out You May Know Them as Sea Urchins, Ma’am, Ray Guy’s 1975 collection of newspaper columns, and re-read the last essay in the book: “This Dear and Fine Country (Spina Sanctus).”

Well, we made it once again, boys! Winter is over.

Oh, but there is still snow on the ground.

So what? It hasn’t got a chance. It is living in jeopardy from day to day. We should pity it because it will soon be ready for the funeral parlour. It is only a matter of another few paltry weeks and we shall see it disappear into brown and foaming brooks; we shall see the meadows burning green and spangled with little piss-a-beds like tiny yellow suns. Winter is over.

Oh, but there is still ice on the water.

So what? The globe is turning and nothing can stop it. We are revolving into light.
The fisherman tars his boat on the beach and is heated by two suns, one in the sky and another reflected from the water, and the ice on the cliff behind him drips away to a poor skeleton.

It is only a matter of a few more paltry weeks and we shall see the steam rising from the ponds andfrom the damp ground behind the plow; we shall see the grandmother sitting out by the doorstep for a few minutes watching the cat; we shall see the small boats a’bustle, piled high with lobster pots in the bow, and the days melting further and further into the night.

Winter is over now.

Praise God and all honour to our forefathers through generations who did
never forsake this dear and fine country.

Ray Guy is a Newfoundland writer. The joke underlying the book title is that sea urchins are sometimes  called whore’s eggs on The Rock. The Latin phrase Spina Sanctus (sanctified by the thorn) was a motto used by George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore, an early settler on Newfoundland’s Southern Shore.

The photograph shows the sun setting over Baddeck at 5:54 p.m. today, itself a sign that winter’s goose is cooked.

In very limited circumstances, anonymity is valuable and justified (e.g., when someone is risking something substantial to expose concealed wrongdoing of serious public interest).  But promiscuous, unjustified anonymity — which pervades the establishment press — is the linchpin of most bad, credibility-destroying reporting.  It enables government officials and others to lie to the public with impunity or manipulate them with propaganda, using eager reporters as both their megaphone and shield.  It is the weapon of choice for reporters eager to serve as loyal message-carriers and royal court gossip columnists.  It preserves and bolsters the culture of secrecy that dominates Washington — exactly the opposite of what a real journalist, by definition, would seek to accomplish (though most modern journalists seem to prefer anonymity, as it makes them appear and feel special and part of the secret halls of power, and allows them to curry favor with powerful officials as their favored loyal message-carrier).  In sum, petty or otherwise unjustified uses of anonymity are the hallmark of the power-worshiping, dishonest, unreliable reporter (which is why its most indiscriminate practitioner is Politico).   As Izzy Stone put it about the Vietnam War:  ”The process of brain-washing the public starts with off-the-record briefings for newspapermen. . . .”