The Globe and Mail published an editorial on Monday defending the necessity of cruelty in editorial cartoons.

A link to the following was left in the comments section of this blog. While you shouldn't see this posting as an endorsation of its contents by myself, here's the URL: GlobalCivility.com

While al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden doesn't mind a hug, he's not big on lip-to-face contact, says an Australian convicted of receiving funds from al Qaeda.

Saw this at David Akin's blog: A new poll of journalists by Compas. Here are some of the key findings:

The State of Press Freedom in Canada

• Very High and Unchanged in a Decade
• Among Journalists as a Whole, the Biggest Threats - Ill-Informed Journalists and Uninterested Audiences
• Among 9% of Journalists with Fear of Firing, the Biggest Threats to Freedom—Advertisers, Senior Editors, and Owners
• Government Secrecy Volunteered as a Threat,
• But Regulatory Reprisal Rarely Seen as Impacting Press Freedom

One can download a .pdf of the entire report from the above link.

CBS wants to send news alerts, including video, to mobile devices like cellphones.

David Lynch's brilliant 1986 film Blue Velvet is getting a two-week, 20th anniversary run in New York. Do you think any of the Toronto rep houses would follow suit? A resounding 'no' is the answer to that question. :(

Because I have less than stellar time management skills, I occasionally find myself running late for work.

One (expensive) remedy is taking a cab from Kennedy subway station to CTV.

And one risk of that approach is getting a ride with Pete.

Through an ancient process known as "quadruple distilling," a distillery on the west island of Islay in Scotland hopes to make a scotch that will be 92 per cent alcohol.

The formerly secular government of Syria is trying to catch some of that Wahhabist wave sweeping through the Arab Islamic world to maintain its cred.

This NYT piece looks at the surprising popularity of a book about a misbehaving yellow Labrador retriever -- and talks about how the real problem might be with the excessively high expectations of today's dog owners.

More and more Western media outlets are concluding the protests over the cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad were more about power plays by radical Islamists. The latest is the NYT editorial board.

Overheard on Bloor St. West in the Annex:

Whoa: Cheer up there, emo boy!

When I went looking around for the video of the ragin' Cajun trying to liven up the goth band, I didn't find it (I really hope I got the right product name, but if I didn't, it's the ad's fault).

But I found something much, much more amusing: The Emo Song!

Actually BSS hasn't broken up; they've just been feted in the NYT magazine.

However, my theory is that when a band/scene gets significant mainstream attention, it's on the downside of its best-before date. :)

At no point in my life did I ever expect to make three postings about Leah McLaren over a two-week period, but I've got to close off some business.

J. Kelly Nestruck summed up the aftermath of the trashing of McLaren's book by one Ryan Bigge, including the reaction of Toronto Star books editor Doug Smith.

Marc Weisblott of Paved almost triggered another feud when he described Nestruck as a fellow fluff reporter. :)

Leah McLaren decides to permanently check out of checking out the blogosphere after doing a Technorati search on herself and several other writers she admires and finding a world of hate, envy and -- worst of all -- bad spelling out there.

The call for more rallies against the Prophet Muhammad cartoons by the Islamic party alliance known as the MMA on drew crowds in the hundreds on Friday.

When the gunmen came for Al-Arabiya's Atwar Bahjat, one yelled, "We want the anchorwoman." On Wednesday, they killed her and two of her colleagues.

And today, her funeral was fired upon by gunmen.

File this under wacky news: A council of elders in Sudan's Upper Nile state has ordered a man caught having sex with someone else's goat to pay that person the equivalent of $50 US as a dowry.

If anyone was looking to make a film on the life of a tortured songwriting genius, Townes Van Zandt lived his to provide all the raw material they could dream of. But the wellspring of that raw material appears to be a treatable mental illness.

He's coming a bit late to this party, but the Toronto Star's Richard Gwynn thinks the recent Prophet Muhammad cartoons controversy is really about a clash between the moderate and fundamentalist schools of Islam.

The Village Voice takes a look at the 9/11 Truth Movement.

Metal: A Headbanger's Journey (I briefly blogged about it; Geoff Pevere reviewed it today in the Star and gave it three stars; the Globe's Liam Lacey gave it 2.5; Evan Davies gave it three in Now;  I'd give it three) is one possibility. It screens at the Paramount downtown and some suburban multiplexes. Now also has a Q-and-A with filmmaker Sam Dunn, who is also profiled in the Globe.

At the Bloor tonight at 9:30 p.m. is Be Here to Love Me, about the lauded, troubled Texas songwriter Townes Van Zandt, whose gift with words and sound made him legendary amongst his peers, but didn't translate into popular acclaim for him.

Here's a sample of the lyrics from Pancho and Lefty, written by Van Zandt and turned into a hit by Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard:

Livin' on the road, my friend,
Was gonna keep you
Free and clean
But now you wear
Your skin like iron
And your breath's as hard
As kerosene

Weren't your momma's only boy
But her favourite one, it seems
She began to cry
As you said ... goodbye
Sang into your dreams

Actually, if you listen to a CD called Live at the Bluebird Cafe, you'll hear one of the worst versions of Pancho and Lefty ever recorded. The singer? Townes Van Zandt! However, Townes also tells some hilarious stories that make up for it.

A few weeks ago, I saw Joe Ely, one of Van Zandt's contemporaries, at the Horseshoe Tavern. He told a story about picking up a hitchhiking Van Zandt (then a stranger) on the outskirts of Lubbock, Texas in the 1970s. Van Zandt had nothing with him except a guitar and copies of his first record, one of which he gave to Ely. "I listened to that record every day for weeks," Ely said.

I saw an ad for Tsotsi, which won the People's Choice Award at TIFF (no critic had touted it in pre-festival writings and reviews), but while it's not in theatres yet, it's coming soon. The film is being released in the U.S. today. This film is up for a best-foreign language film at the Oscars in two weeks.

A film that got good buzz earlier is The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, the directorial debut of Tommy Lee Jones. Peter Howell gave it 3.5 stars in his review for the Star. John Harkness gave it four stars in Now. Rick Groen gave it three stars in the Globe.

The Salon blurb: "By caving in to fanatics over the Danish cartoons, the West has shown that it is not only gutless but brainless," argues U.S. editorial cartoonist Doug Marlette.

While today's Chinese government is just as censorious and authoritarian as its predecessors, some of today's Chinese media figures aren't rolling over and playing dead.

I was on a little blog break for the past 52 hours, but Deb Jones at Canadian Journalist noted there won't be criminal hate crimes charges laid against two publications that printed some of the notorious Prophet Muhammad cartoons.

Two teenage girls talking on the Scarborough Rapid Transit Line:

Girl One:

Kieran gave me a taco.

He loves me.

Girl Two:

Kieran doesn't share his food with anyone.

I went over to The Dirt (http://mediadirt.blogspot.com) the other day. Gone was the Canadian media gossip. Actually, pretty much every trace of its previous existence was gone.

That was possibly to be expected. "Dirty Dan" had been dropping broad hints about its possible demise.

However, the domain name is back. But this latest incarnation seems to have it as a splog for adult entertainment industry products.

The Organization of Islamic Countries has spoken out against death threats against anyone involved in the Prophet Muhammad cartoons controversy and says violent protests are hurting the image of Islam.

Way back in the 17th century, England's King Charles II decreed there always be six ravens at the Tower of London.

The legend is that if the birds were ever to leave the tower, the White Tower would crumble, and England would pretty much follow suit.

As you can see, when the fate of a nation of 55 million is at stake, serious measures must be taken to protect the ravens from emerging threats like bird flu.

For the time being, that means keeping them inside in specially builty aviaries.

Here's the AP story on CTV.ca.

The protests are to continue until the arrival of Dubya next month, and include a call for a nation-wide strike on Friday. However, Qazi Hussain, leader of the six-party alliance known as MMA, also said his campaign was also aimed at Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf for his "pro-western policies."

See the BBC story for details, but it doesn't strike me that cartoons are really the issue there anymore.

Shams (Sun), a Saudi newspaper, was acting with the best of intentions when it republished some of the infamous Prophet Muhammad cartoons with an eye towards mobilizing its young Saudi readership against Denmark.

You know what they say about the road to hell and best intentions.