Clara Hughes is awesome.  She inspired me to take up Speed Skating, and is also an amazing writer and an inspiring all-round person.  When she puts up a piece of writing, I have high expectations, and they’re always met or surpassed.

This time, she blew my expectations away.  When I say to people that cycling is a team sport, people often look at me like I have two heads.  I try and explain tactics, and effort, and drafting, and it all falls apart, and people just shake their head, and walk away, unenlightened.

With one simple anecdote, she explains beautifully how and why she went on the attack in Fleche Wallonne, and how that helped Evie Stevens win the race.  With typical modesty, she doesn’t mention that Marianne Vos had to chase her because she could easily have won and Vos knew it.

I note parenthetically that the Court did not comment on who may have abducted the Lindbergh baby. However, silence on such an issue does not suggest that the City or the Court condones kidnapping.

His entire column is good, but the last 2 paragraphs are, or at least should be, a punch in the gut to anyone who thinks that Parliamentary processes are archaic niceties, or for that matter, that the Conservatives care about how taxpayer money is spent. 

Had Parliament been given the costing information it demanded, we might have been in a better position to judge who was right, the government or its critics — before the last election, not after. Remember, it was the government’s refusal to provide just this information that was, in part, the reason for the motion of no-confidence that precipitated the election.

So this is also what comes of Parliament’s prerogatives, its powers to hold ministers to account, being ignored or overridden. These aren’t procedural niceties, of concern only to constitutional law professors — “process issues,” as more than one member of the press gallery sneered at the time. They’re the vital bulwarks of self-government, the only means we have of ensuring our wishes are obeyed and our money isn’t wasted.

Why does Katy Perry have fireworks shooting out of her … chest?

Gerlach-ians are awesome

I’ve been trying to find the best story on the whole Daisey, This American Life, Apple, Foxconn debacle.  I think this one takes the cake.

The thing is, that these lies, these distortions, these fabrications, these untruths don’t make for a better story. They make for an easier one, a story with fewer thorns to swallow on the way down, a less complicated story.

Maybe I’m just suspicious of these “better” stories because to me, the best stories are the most complicated ones, the ones that refuse to resolve in easy ways. Those are the stories that are most true because resolution is something that always remains just beyond our grasp.

For example, the TAL story of the retraction of Mike Daisey’s is far more riveting that the original tale of Daisey’s trip to China, I promise.

But I think there’s a deeper truth here, a motivation that extends beyond the transparent B.S. that these lies are in the service of a higher calling.

What these lies invariably do to the stories is take the focus off the story itself, and place it on the storyteller.

Even before Daisey’s lies were exposed, his use of them served to make himself more central to the tale. The story is no longer about exploited workers, but about an intrepid and dogged Mike Daisey who cares so darn much he has to go and witness firsthand how his gadgets get made, and once there, connects so personally and profoundly with these workers, that only he can come back home and tell the story in a way that will change hearts and minds. Daisey isn’t in it for the money, but for the ego.

The only way penguins fly (by JAWorthingtonRoth)