I saw a documentary called Carny tonight, and it brought back a few memories.

In a marked departure, China's news media have given open and aggressive coverage to the earthquake disaster in Sichuan province.

Headline in the Toronto Star today: Learn to love tourists this summer.

The Globe and Mail's Patricia Best relays a hilarious story about one of my favourite world leaders.

In this case, the negligent parents were two adult Canada geese.

I was heading home from work, riding south on one of the McCowan Street buses just south of Corporate Drive (the intersection with Extend The Brand Road is one of Toronto's hidden-gem intersections) when all of a sudden, everyone starts doing brakestands.

I look to see what the hell is going on, and two adult geese are crossing from west to east, with two awkward goslings in tow.

McCowan has three lanes of traffic going south, and three going north. Considering drivers don't even like stopping for pedestrians there, I'd say these geese got off easy.

At least I think they got off easy. The bus moved on before they tried crossing the northbound lanes.

The parents picked a crossing where there's a concrete divider that tapers down. They could go up and over easily enough, but one of the little ones was having some problems with this obstacle.

Bonne chance, my feathered, excrement-machine friends.

From CP via globeandmail.com:

Tony Burman, the one-time head of CBC news, has been appointed managing director of Al Jazeera's English operations.

The BBC's Paul Danahar on his efforts to stay out of the clutches of Burma's Special Branch police and keep reporting from the disaster-ridden country.

If you haven't heard, Karl Rove -- once best known as Bush's Brain -- is a pundit for Fox News while also acting as an informal adviser to presumptive Republican nominee John McCain. But he's hardly the only ex-politico backroomer showing up on American airwaves.

Craigslist founder Craig Newmark thinks there's many reasons besides his creation why U.S. newspapers are facing troubles these days -- even though it pulls in US$80 million to $100 million annually with just 25 employees.

Vancouver writer Stan Persky on the 75th anniversary of a notorious event in anti-intellectualism. He wrote about it at the Tyee:

May 12, 2008 -- Some things I take personally. This is one of them. That's because I write books. So, whenever people burn books -- whether it's the ancient library of Alexandria, Egypt going up in flames nearly two millennia in the past, or the 2003 torching of the National Library in Baghdad just five years ago, at the beginning of the U.S. invasion of Iraq -- I take offence. And it's personal. When the temperature reaches Fahrenheit 451, the degree at which paper burns, books like mine were and are reduced to ashes.

Opernplatz Square, 1933.

That flame-scorched history is why I was in Berlin's August Bebel Platz on Sat., May 10. It's the site where, 75 years ago on that date in 1933, the most notorious book burning of the 20th century was ignited by the then recently-installed Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler. Less than four months after Hitler became chancellor of Germany, Nazi students throughout the country were egged on by Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels to purge the nation's libraries of all thought of which the government didn't approve. ...

As the tongues of hungry flame lit up the night sky, Goebbels himself was on hand to put the government's official stamp on the event. "My fellow students, German men and women, the era of exaggerated Jewish intellectualism is now at an end," the propaganda chief declared. He promised the mob that "the future German man will not just be a man of books." The young would be educated "to repudiate the fear of death in order to gain again the respect for death. That is the mission of the young and therefore you do well at this late hour to entrust to the flames the intellectual garbage of the past." ...

If one wants a more shudder-inducing, immediate sense of the event being remembered, it's as close as your computer. The Nazis, obsessed with recording the triumphs of what they expected to be a Thousand Year Reich, scrupulously filmed the May 1933 book burning. There are the crackling flames, and there's Goebbels, thundering away, in a film clip available at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum website.

From a BBC collection of blog postings and independent reportage in the wake of cyclone Nardis's horrific strike on Burma:

A reporter for the Mizzima news site, based in India and run by Burmese exiles, interviewed some survivors.

Twelve-year-old Ma Ei Lay walked for days to the nearest township after her family perished in the storm. "I waded through the corpses and came back to my village. I could not recognise my own village. Only some trees were left without leaves."

"Those who found the corpses probably cut off the ears and hands to take the earrings and bracelets," he said. 

Her journey was through a wasteland with no food or aid. "I drank coconut milk. There was no water on the way."

An anonymous survivor talks about the psychological damage sustained. "Most of the people lost their family members while they were clinging to each other... Many people are traumatised and have a lost look on their face as if they are semi-unconscious."

The desperate situation in the delta is documented in other exile Burmese news sites such as Yoma3 which has heard of the spread of disease among the cyclone victims in Bogalay.

A resident of the south-western township of Kyonmange who is helping the cyclone victims there gave grisly detail to the Democratic Voice of Burma about corpses being found without ears and hands - interpreted as evidence of looting.

From the deck for David Olive's column in the Sunday Star: "Unprecedented ineptitude and complacency are leading America's paper of record into irrelevance."

It's been five years since a journalistic time bomb named Jayson Blair finally exploded at the New York Times, leading to an article published on the newspaper's website with the following sombre headline: "Times Reporter Who Resigned Leaves Long Trail of Deception."

The sometimes media critic writes on his thoughts about the $450 million temple to the news biz that recently opened in Washington, D.C.

Globe and Mail reporter Katherine O'Neill on her first order of business upon arriving in Afghanistan: Buying a burka.