Here's a suggestion from Roach-o-Rama in Kensington Market:

Even Mom needs a bong

I'll take that under advisement.

On Thursday night, I went to a Canadian Journalism Foundation event billed as The Media, the Military and The Pollsters: Who's got the story on Afghanistan?

Lyse Doucette, the BBC's Afghanistan analyst, looks at the myriad problems holding back Afghanistan's development five years after the Taliban's overthrowal.

From AP via CTV.ca:

When Iranian journalist Mojtaba Saminejad was sentenced to two years in prison for insulting the country's Supreme Leader, it was not for an article that appeared in a newspaper. His offending story was posted on his personal Web blog.

Nearly one-third of journalists now serving time in prisons around the world published their work on the Internet, the second-largest category behind print journalists, the Committee to Protect Journalists said in an analysis released Thursday.

The bulk of Internet journalists in jail -- 49 in total -- shows that "authoritarian states are becoming more determined to control the Internet," said Joel Simon, the New York-based group's executive director.

"It wasn't so long ago that people were talking about the Internet as a new medium that could never be controlled," he said. "The reality is that governments are now recognizing they need to control the Internet to control information."

Here's the CPJ news release.

Alive in Baghdad is a blog that has recently been honoured with some awards. The premise is simple: Allow Iraqis to tell their own stories about trying to survive the current chaos.

From an NYT story about pets as accessories for New Yorkers of a certain socio-economic class:

Flaunted as fashion statements, pint-sized canines are, to some minds, the fur-bearing equivalent of a pair of Louboutin pumps or other accessory. “I think of them as a handbag with a heartbeat,” said Robin Bowden, a vice president of Prudential Douglas Elliman, a real estate company in Manhattan. Ms. Bowden’s office on West 17th Street is a kind of home-away-from-home to a clutch of lavishly outfitted lap dogs belonging to various employees. “They have little beds and they scamper up and down,” she said. “I’ve seen brokers showing expensive SoHo lofts, turning up with these tiny puppy dogs in their designer bags.” ...

Joe Fornabaio for The New York Times Muffin, a Yorkie, has her own rack of clothes.

In the view of many owners, no amount of pampering is too much. They blithely ignore health ordinances barring dogs from restaurants. Muffin, a 3-year-old Yorkie, is a weekend regular at the Cafe Orlin on St. Marks Place in Manhattan. “I like to take her to brunch,” said Alex Revana, her mistress.

Ms. Revana, a freelance fashion stylist, has provided Muffin with her own doggie garment rack with miniature hangers to hold knitted, fleece and quilted cover-ups. Muffin’s toys include a rubber Chewy Vuitton, and she dines on California Natural, organic pet food.

Paige, Ms. Lewis’s dog, owns 40 outfits, among them an Hermès coat. Part of Ms. Lewis’s closet is designated for the dog. Like her mistress, she likes to make a fashion statement. “With the two of us it’s an equal opportunity thing,” Ms. Lewis said. “I sit up at wee hours of the night online to find that one store in, like, Canada or Switzerland, so Paige can have that one sweater that no New Yorker will ever have.”

“You wanted frankness -- I thought we would succeed quicker than we did. And I am disappointed by the pace of success.”

-- U.S. President George W. Bush talking about Iraq on Dec. 7, 2006

I'm at the intersection of College and Clinton St. earlier this evening. There are two women (I don't know either one) off to my left.

The temperature was about -10 degrees Celsius but felt like -19 with the windchill.

One is kvetching to the other about how cold it is. "Yeah, it's a good night to stay indoors and do nothing," the friend replied.

I actually didn't find it that cold, and so I interjected.

"C'mon folks, toughen up!" I said in what I thought to be a lighthearted way.

One gal, the friend, laughed.

The kvetcher reacted somewhat differently.

"WH-A-A-A-T-T-T?!?!" she yelled, stopping and glaring at me.

The friend smirked. I followed up with, "It's winter, so enjoy it!" punctuated by raising my hands and turning my palms up in a "what can you do?" gesture.

"You're a fucking idiot," the kvetcher said, following that with, "Fuck off, you fucking asshole."

As they walked off, the friend looked back out of the corner of her eye and smiled at me again as they headed south on Clinton, and I turned west on College. The kvetcher was still muttering with outrage.

"Merry Christmas!" I replied with as much faux sweetness as I could muster.

Afterthought

I guess know I know how Borat feels. :)

I should say that to me, the kvetcher's eyes did not look to be those of a high-functioning person's.

The subject line of an email from the Western Standard:

Buy a Mark Steyn t-shirt in time for Christmas!

From Statistics Canada (Dec. 6)

The operating profit margin for Canadian newspaper publishers declined for the second consecutive year in 2005, as the growth in operating expenses outpaced the growth in revenue.

Data from the survey of newspaper publishers show that the industry's operating profit margin in 2005 was 13.3%, compared with 14.2% in 2004 and 15.1% in 2003.

Microsoft's Bill Gates once predicted the problem of email spam would be solved by 2006. Ha! Ha! Ha! That's like calling something "raccoon-proof."

From a Dec. 5 AP story on ABC News:

 German authorities have informed NATO-led troops in Afghanistan that two journalists may have been kidnapped in the country's volatile south, NATO's spokesman said Tuesday.

The two journalists, whose identities and media organization were not identified, reportedly went missing in Kandahar province on Monday, said Maj. Luke Knitting, the spokesman for the NATO-led forces in Afghanistan.

"German authorities told us that two journalists may have been kidnapped in southern Afghanistan," Knittig said.

A German foreign ministry spokesman in Berlin, speaking on customary condition of anonymity, confirmed that it has reports of a German citizen possibly missing in Afghanistan since Monday.

He had no information on the other journalist's nationality.

A poll conducted for the BBC World Service and ABC News finds that while Afghans still think their country is on the right track, optimism about the future has fallen significantly in the past year.

From the BBC:

A Yemeni editor has been fined for reprinting controversial cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad from a Danish newspaper earlier this year.
Muhammad Assadi of the Yemen Observer daily was found guilty of denigrating Islam and fined 0.5m riyals (£1,280).

The cartoons caused Muslim anger around the world. Mr Assadi said he wanted to show Yemenis how insulting they were.

Last month a Yemeni editor was jailed for a year for reprinting the images. Another still faces similar charges.

Gannett's experiment in radically reworking what its newsrooms do puts the focus on the Web first and print product second. Reporters' offices are their cars. No story is too local.

From a speech by Peter Horrocks, head of the Beeb's TV News Services, to the Reuters journalism institute at Oxford (posted at the BBC's The Editors blog):

Dr. Qadir Assemy, a doctor in Herat, tells the BBC about the rebirth of his city. I found this paragraph about the Taliban's time in control there to be sad:

In my culture anyone called a "Taleb" is a deprived, poor man with nowhere to stay but a mosque. For us, talking about a Taleban who could lead a society or capture a city like Kandahar sounded unbelievable.

And then we came to realise that these people were not the Taleban in the way we always understood it. Overnight, we were told the Taleban were going to take Herat. Overnight, everything changed.

Schools were banned for girls, there was no media, no television, music, western clothes - I could not wear jeans anymore. We had to grow beards and my female classmates, teachers and lecturers were not there anymore.

I do not believe that Europeans have lived like this; to have an illiterate guy stop you at a checkpoint and hurt you for having a tape in your vehicle or asking why your beard is not appropriately long is awful.

The Wall Street Journal will unveil its updated look on Jan. 2. Expect a narrower paper and smaller newshole.

The Star did a story on some communications academics who tried to measure the impact of bloggers at the Liberal leadership convention.

The Globe blurb: Known as the headquarters of the Taliban, Quetta's streets throb with anger at Kabul and Islamabad, GRAEME SMITH reports.

From the NYT:

Hoping to turn the millions of people with digital cameras and camera phones into photojournalists, Yahoo and Reuters are introducing a new effort to showcase photographs and video of news events submitted by the public.

   more »

A what-if scenario about some tasty extras for the Borat DVD whenever it comes out (just in time for Christmas? Dare we dream?!?!)

Ahmed Rashid, one of Pakistan's foremost journalists, explained why Pashtuns are P.O.ed with the negative image that has been painted on them.

AP via Yahoo! News:

Three Danish journalists who published classified intelligence reports on Iraq's former weapons program were acquitted Monday on charges of endangering national security.

The Copenhagen City Court ruled that Niels Lunde, chief editor of the Berlingske Tidende newspaper, and reporters Michael Bjerre and Jesper Larsen acted in the public interest when they published a series of articles in 2004 citing leaked Danish intelligence reports.

The articles said there was no evidence Iraq had weapons of mass destruction at the time of the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, one of the key reasons cited by the U.S. and Britain for going to war.

A former intelligence officer previously has been sentenced to four months in prison for leaking the documents in the case, which was viewed in Denmark as a landmark test of media freedom. ...

Judge Peter Lind Larsen said the "considerable public interest" in the information outweighed the government's concerns that its intelligence-gathering operations were jeopardized.

Here's a link to the BBC story too.

A salmon trying to make it up the Moricetown rapids (some call them falls) on the Bulkley River at Moricetown, B.C. There's an old t-shirt that has the saying "spawn or die" on it. That pretty much sums it up.

The NYT's David Carr recalls how earlier in his career, he told the aggrieved subject of one story, "is it worse that I said it, or worse that it’s true?" And so it goes with calling the Iraq situation a civil war.

Back during my summer vacation, I was driving out to Saskatoon to see some old friends from there. As I passed through Vegreville, Alta., I thought to myself, "I've never been to Hairy Hill."

That gap in my life experience was remedied.

Here's a quick profile I did for CTV.ca of new Alberta Tory leader Ed Stelmach .

Not that I know the guy personally, but I know that area northeast of Edmonton quite well. My dad's quarter-section of land is about a 20-minute drive from Andrew, which is where Stelmach's farm is located.

That's a pretty damned Ukrainian part of Alberta! (as opposed to being a pretty damned part of Alberta, because of the Ukrainians)

And if you ever go to western Ukraine, you can see why. For my grandparents, it would have been a lot like home.

The Toronto Sun announced 16 layoffs and the elimination of 10 vacant positions on Friday, acting on a commitment announced in June to eliminate up to 30 jobs.

The troops of the Netherlands work in Uruzgan province, immediately north of Kandahar province, which is where Canada's troops are located. However, the Dutch are having an easier time of it than the Canadians. Could it be the Dutch have a gentler touch with the locals?

From the NYT:

BEIJING, Dec. 1 — China announced temporary regulations on Friday loosening restrictions on foreign journalists, a step intended to fulfill the country’s promise to allow visiting reporters to work freely in advance of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

The rules, announced by the Foreign Ministry, will supersede existing restrictions that require journalists to obtain government approval before traveling or conducting interviews. Under the new rules, a foreign journalist will only need to obtain the permission of the person being interviewed.

“It is crystal clear that as long as the interviewee agrees, you can do your reporting,” the ministry spokesman, Liu Jianchao, told reporters at a briefing.

The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China, a Beijing-based association of international news bureaus, applauded the new rules and singled out the Foreign Ministry for praise. But the group also called on the government to make the regulations permanent. The rules take effect on Jan. 1 and end Oct. 17, 2008, after the conclusion of the Paralympics.

An agreement reached in Afghanistan's Helmand province between the central government and tribal elders could be setting exactly the wrong precedent.