Air Canada is getting better

Knock on wood, but it looks like the airline we all love to hate is working on getting better.
Yes, we had two good flights from Air Canada on our recent trip to Toronto -- and then the airline also sent me a questionnaire to ask about our experience.
So, for the first time it appears that Air Canada actually cares whether we liked flying with them or not -- now, that's an advance!
CEO Calin Rovinescu has set what is likely a realistic goal for customer satisfaction:

Winning over consumers will also be challenging and, despite much skepticism, Mr. Rovinescu is forging ahead in his quest to create a kinder and gentler Air Canada.
“What are the chances of having a good flight and a high level of service? They're certainly, I would say, better than 90 per cent. Less than 10 per cent of the time, people may have less than happy experiences,” he said.

The only thing I didn't like about our trip was the automatic check-in kiosks in the Toronto airport -- difficult to work our way through screen after screen, and then we had to stand in line anyway to check our luggage. But basically, other than that, Air Canada did a great job.

Brother can you spare a dime?

Here is Lance Manion writing about the new movie The Soloist, which is about LA Times reporter Steve Lopez's friendship with homeless Nathaniel Ayers:

"It's the nature of the business," we hear a nameless, faceless suit tell a reporter who's being laid off and who is also, appropriately, now nameless and faceless. And in the suit's earnest, practical, condescending and scolding tones we can hear the voice of the Times and the times. The human being losing his job is expected not just to understand but to approve. The nature of the business has become the nature of our society---we are all expected to understand that we are each expendable and replaceable, that our sole (soul's) purpose is to be at the service of the business and we should appreciate it when we are expended and replaced because aren't we lucky to live in a society where our being expendable and replaceable so improves the common good? Stock prices go up, someone else gets to keep his job---probably the guy telling you you've just lost yours---money's being made and spent and somewhere someone will eat well tonight because we have served the business by accepting that we are no longer of use to it.

Today the news is all over the blogs about the significant increase in the long-term US unemployment rate and how half a million people in the States will have exhausted their unemployment by the end of September.
Food banks will be the new growth industry.
This song keeps running through my head:

Saturday Morning Cartoon

Duck Amuck! was voted to be the second greatest cartoon of all time (What's Opera, Doc? was first)

Nuts

How terrifying it would be, to be Glenn Beck and to believe that the government is keeping an eye on Glenn Beck. I guess Obama must be using Bush's warrentless wiretap program, the one that all the right-wing pundits were so happy about.

Lying for a living

Amazing -- ratfucking is no longer the preserve of unprincipled sleazy political operatives but has become mainstream. Just another advance we can thank the Republicans for.

Great line of the day

Rick Salutin writes a sensible column about the Toronto civic strike He's the first commentator I have read who tries to get away from the horserace talk of "winners and losers" and accurately describe what actually happened:

The Globe's Marcus Gee wrote that at most, the mayor won a “partial victory.” Others said he “caved.” The National Post headlined, “Unions won, hands down.” His last press conference was like a lynch mob. Please note that the war talk didn't come from the unions. What had they “won,” to so annoy the class-warmongers? Exactly nothing. They gained nothing, never even aimed to gain. Their goals were to preserve what they had, and they got at most a partial victory. They held onto a diminishing (unto zero) part of their sick days bank, and a fraction of the wage increase that others, like police, received. What kind of victory do the critics want – unconditional surrender? Maybe the mayor should have A-bombed the picket lines. But if you call for social warfare, you might get it. There are scattered signs: VIA went briefly on strike; in South Africa, there are riots against the failure to deliver social justice as promised since the end of apartheid; even in the United States, people have been arrested, calling for single-payer health care. What causes social upheaval is not so much desperation, which is always in supply, as it is overdoses of sanctimony, hypocrisy and double standards.

Emphasis mine.

Hillbilly fantasyland

Speaking from hillbilly fantasyland, Peter MacKay says the Canadian government is going to order 50 ships over the next 30 years. Dave calls them Harper's hillbilly Conservatives and he's right.
And rather than awarding these billions of public dollars in shipbuilding contracts through old-fashioned competitive bidding, the Cons have developed great new system which will allow them to decide which shipyards to support:

...a new process that theoretically will allow the government to pick and choose in a more direct way which Canadian shipyards will build which ships.

I just hope none of those shipyards have any gay employees -- Charles McVety will complain and Tony Clements will have to take over deciding which shipyards can be trusted!
Ya know, at some point Canadians are going to realize that the Harper Conservatives don't actually know how to run a government.

Henry Louis Gates is a ni....

The Boston policeman now says:

... he didn't mean to use words like 'banana eating jungle monkey' "in a racist way."
"It was a poor choice of words," Barrett said. I didn't mean it in a racist way. I treat everyone with dignity and respect.".

If he HAD meant to be disrespectful, undignified and racist, what would he have said?

Oh, sure

In a comment to Dawg's excellent coverage of the Suaad Hagi Mohamud scandal, Zia writes:

there could be a logical explanation for everything

Why yes, that's true.
But given the pattern of how our own government appears to give both irresponsible authority and unwarranted credibility to anonymous secret allegations against Canadian citizens who run into trouble overseas, I doubt it.

The stupid, it burns!

H.L. Mencken once said that nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
Case in point.

Miracles for sale, just $58

From Effect Measures, here is an hilarious video from Australian TV, especially the last 30 seconds:



I don't think American or Canadian TV could get away with this type of critique any more.
Also, check out this one, reminds me of the Daily Show in skewering journanimalism. Again, don't miss the last 30 seconds:

Progress

Better dying through technology.

Great line of the day

Melissa McEwan writes about the post-racist country sibboleth:

I noted, once again, the irony how it's never white people doing racist things, or other white people subsequently denying even the possibility of racism inherent to those things, that are called the race-baiters, but instead the people of color who call that shit out. It's always people of color and their gosh darn insistence on talking about racism who are accused of preventing racial unity, not the white people who engage in racism.
Thus, the narrative becomes that Obama, by talking about the history of police racism, is a bigger threat to racial unity than the actual police who practice and perpetuate institutional racism.
KBlogz, always with the devastatingly witty insight, suggested wryly: "The media should go burn a cross on the White House lawn to remind Obama that racism is over."

Vancouver lightning

On Saturday night, a lightning storm hit Vancouver and a fireworks show was going on at English Bay during the same time. Below are some spectacular photos from Vancouver Sun readers:

So WTF was that all about?

The Via engineers, after two years without a contract, finally go on strike Friday.
Two days later, after disrupting the holiday plans of thousands of people and costing their company hundreds of thousands of dollars, they announce they are going back to work.
Now, I'm a union supporter, but this is ridiculous -- why did they go on strike at all? What was the matter with either the company or the union or both, that they couldn't have worked this out three days earlier?
And here I thought the Toronto strikers had set a new low in Canadian labour stupidity ...