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Afterthoughts

Sometime in the early 1990s, I was up in Saskatoon covering a legal conference. There was a horrible thunderstorm, that unbeknownst to me at the time, spawned a small tornado.

This twister damaged no property and caused no injuries. The normally excitable Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, the Regina Leader-Post's sister paper, showed restraint by doing "only" 11 stories. I always wondered what they would have done to top that had there been death and destruction.

Anyways, some woman shows up in Regina that night with what she says are pictures of the tornado. She took them with a Kodak Instamatic and they were basically as full-frame as what the NYT highlighted above.

She was reportedly blasé about it, but our shooters shat themselves when they saw the pics. She apparently didn't realize she'd put her life in great danger.

Reminds me of the following song (name the artist!):

Texas tornado
Comin' down from the sky
Texas tornado
Lord I don't wanna die!
Texas tornado
The Lord's gonna see us through
Texas tornado
Be careful it don't get you

Skip ahead to the late 1990s. I'm now working at the Western Producer, a weekly agricultural newspaper in Saskatoon. A guy comes in, and does he have a story to tell!

He rented a front-end loader to do some work on a place south of Swift Current, in the province's southwest. He's beavering away when he sees a twister coming! He phones the machine's owner in a panic and asks for advice. "Hold on!" is what he is told. So he does.

This little twister passes right over him. He's inside a tornado.

The twister bangs him around a bit, but it's small and the machine's large, so he survived. After the twister hits, he's in the cab, panting and thanking his lucky stars. His cellphone, which had fallen to the floor, rings. It's the RCMP. The owner had phoned the cops, and they phoned the guy to tell him to watch out -- another one might be coming!

He watched as the second twister blew apart a building.

Where might you expect this story to play in a newspaper crying out for good human-interest stories?

If you guessed page 17, you'd be right.

It didn't manage to push the usual "Dull politician makes boring pronouncement" story off the front page.

I wince about that to this day -- and no, I didn't write that story; I just don't like to see great yarns like that get buried. I still haven't heard about a second person who was inside a tornado and lived.

Mark Lynas, author of the 2007 book Six Degrees, argues that to get world governments to take the climate issue seriously, a disaster might be needed sometime in 2010 or 2011.

At a session in Stockholm, Lynas and other climate experts tried to envisage some scenarios: "Agree and ignore," where governments admit there is a problem but do nothing, and "Kyoto Plus," which would be committing to new, stronger targets but not really getting emissions to stop rising before 2030.

And then there's "step change."

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From the Guardian:

China's carbon emissions are soaring past those of the US, new figures reveal, making it the dominant country in the global warming debate.

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Tim Russert -- host of NBC's Meet the Press, a host of several presidential primary debates and a bit player in the Scooter Libby affair -- has died at age 58.

More at the NYT's The Caucus blog.

You can also check out this CTV.ca story.

From AP via CTV.ca:

Fox News Channel referred to Michelle Obama as "Obama's baby mama" in a graphic on Wednesday, the latest in a trio of references to the Democratic presidential campaign that have given fuel to network critics.

The graphic "Outraged liberals: Stop picking on Obama's baby mama" was flashed during an interview with conservative columnist Michelle Malkin about whether Barack Obama's wife has been the target of unfair criticism.

In the past two weeks, Fox anchor E.D. Hill has apologized for referring to an affectionate onstage fist bump shared by the couple as a "terrorist fist jab," and Fox contributor Liz Trotta said she was sorry for joking about an Obama assassination. ...

Joan Walsh, a columnist from Salon.com, criticized the graphic on Thursday as a slur.

"Do you try to explain that 'baby mama' is slang for the unmarried mother of a man's child, and not his wife, or even a girlfriend?" Walsh wrote. "Are they racist, or just clueless? Isn't there racism even in their cluelessness, if somebody didn't know what 'baby mama' means, but used it anyway? Even at Fox, won't somebody have to apologize?"

It's not in the above wire story, but apparently someone at Fox has apologized.

Salon also has this backgrounder on the offending phrase.

From the Globe and Mail:

"Over the years, people have urged me to remaster The Last Pogo, but it is what it is," filmmaker Colin Brunton says, talking on his cellphone from Canadian Tire. "When the sound falls apart at the end, that's exactly what happened at the show - it was chaos."

It has been three decades since Brunton made The Last Pogo as a 25-minute film document of Toronto's vibrant punk scene - begging for leftover film stock, borrowing film students and gear and persuading arts councils to give him grants to complete it. And now, the film is being dusted off (literally) for a screening at North by Northeast's music-themed film festival this weekend.

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I was fishing off a bridge just outside Wabasca, Alta. in the summer of 1985 (the area is known for its terrific walleye fishing).

At one point, an ambulance went screaming by me. It was heading out of town towards Slave Lake, about 120-plus kilometres to the southwest.

I wondered out loud what that was about.

"Oh, that was Joe," said a boy in a strangely matter-of-fact voice. "He shot himself in the head this morning."

It's always haunted me that some children grow up in environments where suicide is almost normal.

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From AP via globeandmail.com:

Democrat Barack Obama's campaign said Thursday that Michelle Obama never used the word “whitey” in a speech from the church pulpit as it launched a Web site to debunk rumours about him and his wife.

The rumour that Michelle Obama railed against “whitey” in a diatribe at Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ has circulated on conservative Republican blogs for weeks and was repeated by radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh. The rumour included claims of a videotape of the speech that would be used to bring down Mr. Obama's candidacy this fall.

“No such tape exists,” the campaign responds on the site, www.fightthesmears.com. “Michelle Obama has not spoken from the pulpit at Trinity and has not used that word.”

The site is a response to the realities of a brave new world, where information travels 24 hours a day on blogs and voters are increasingly turning to the Internet for information. It's a particular problem for Mr. Obama, a relative newcomer to national politics who is still unknown to many voters and has been the target of persistent misinformation campaigns online.