Nick's Café Canadien

Not much in the way of positive, uplifting news this week in the world of people who play chess a lot better than all of us combined ever will. First Kasparaov retires – though mind you, there really is no better guy to spearhead the effort to cut Putin down to size, and devoting more of his energy to it isn’t a bad thing – and now Japan has ruled that Bobby Fischer will be deported back to America. While I’ll admit that Fischer has become a bit of a loon in recent years, this is doing nothing to help, and the grounds for his criminality – that his 1992 rematch with Spassky was an economic activity that violated sanctions on Yugoslavia – remain absolutely preposterous. I suppose this is the kind of thing that happens when you mess with a bona fide genius, no pun intended.

In other news, yesterday’s Gateway had a terrific crop of letters, one of which said exactly what I’ve been trying to say for days, but better and in fewer words. Megan Grieve wrote:

I myself voted for Mustafa. He seemed to have an intelligent and serious platform but, most importantly, he seemed to want the position for the right reasons. Lettner’s platform, that repeatedly mentioned the Powerplant, seemed more suited to someone running for VP (Student Life).

Lettner seemed to take the whole election as a joke, and the only time I heard him speak was at the candidate forum in which his entire speech consisted of an unamusing frozen (as in tuition) metaphor. If I wanted a joke candidate, I would have voted for Spanky. Yet it was met with a resounding cheer from the audience and now he’s our new president – I don’t understand.

I could not agree more, though for my part, I found Lettner’s speech amusing – as a speech alone, that is, and not in context of the Myer forum where it was delivered, and where I was hoping to hear some real ideas. Be that as it may, Lettner still has a year ahead of him to do something useful with the organization, and in spite of some massive turnover we may have some decent Councilors to keep him in check. The best part of the letter is that nobody has any idea who the writer is. Informed normal students exist! Now, if only we could apply the same principles to ferret out the extraterrestrials.

And while on the subject of extraterrestrials, I want to digress for a moment and make some brief observations on various works of literature I have delved into of late.

Edgar Rice Burroughs is an interesting fellow, in that it is difficult to pinpoint exactly where he stands when it comes to imperialism and the White Man’s Burden in all its assorted flavours. On one hand, the worldview he exhibits is clearly one that divides the world into people who are savage brutes and people who aren’t. In A Princess of Mars, the difference between the two is that the former has a capacity for love and compassion. It opens with John Carter fleeing a band of Indians, who are naturally a posse of uncivilized cowboy-hunters. Where it gets interesting, though, is when he ends up on Mars and falls in with the Green Men of Thark, a brutish tribe of warriors for whom killing is acceptable so long as you triumph over your foe and seize his rank and possessions, laughter is a mark of delight in the suffering of others, and the bonds of family extend only to dumping your kids in a public incubator for five years until they hatch. In a telling scene, our protagonistic Gentleman of Virginia tames their ravenous beasts of war with a display of his teeming love and empathy. The message here is less than subtle.

Naturally, they are an ugly people with green skin and eyes in weird places. In contrast, the peaceful, scientific red-skinned people of the Kingdom of Helium are a more human sort, and even perform the courtesy of providing the requisite beautiful princess to be rescued. Put all of this together, and it seems like a matter of black and white: Helium is civilized, Thark is not. Bad Thark!

At least, that’s how it seems, until a number of other considerations come into play. Thark is not an undeveloped society; in fact, it evolved into a Spartan warrior state, and one that acts as a colonizer, not the colonized. Moreover, John Carter ultimately fights not the Tharks, but the Zodangans, a society that one could judge to be “civilized” along the same axis, because the Zodangan prince was betrothed to the titular princess, Dejah Thoris. The Tharks, as a loveless society, have no familial construct, yet it is precisely by the presence of kinship laws that Zodanga falls. And as we all know, chivalric romance reduces to nuptial law in the last instance.

The other joke, though whether we are laughing with Burroughs or at him is indeterminate, is that the Tharks are an exact representation of everything that Nietzsche says human beings are: animals that thrive on bloodlust and take pleasure in the suffering of others. Thark is humanity in its uncensored form. Its people differ from all others in that they see no need to justify revenge by calling it retributive justice, or validate bonds of economic gain with artificial constructions of love and marriage. As a society without guilt, it needs no social structures or deities for the sake of absolution. But over in Zodanga, the pillars of civilization – nuptial law in particular – becomes that civilization’s undoing. So who, or what, is the enemy? Maybe the very act of colonizing is to remake the enemy as a friend.

This is, after all, the same author who presented the inversion of having apes civilize a Greystoke of noble birth and raise him as one of their own. I would say more, but I have never read Tarzan of the Apes and have no idea how it ends.

I also wish to say a few words about Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco, as it begs – indeed, it grovels on its trembling knees – for a comparative study alongside The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (which, now that I think about it, should have borne the far catchier and more grammatically sensible moniker The Code Da Vinci).

The two cover a lot of similar ground in trying to play connect-the-dots with occult history’s greatest hits and presenting it as a Rembrandt of a grand conspiracy, but aside from the prominence of Templars, Merovingians, and Rosicrucians (oh my!) they reside on opposite poles of the literary globe. They share a core, but they never see nor talk to each other, and probably shouldn’t lest there be the outbreak of nuclear war. It would be unfair to evaluate them by relative merit, since they lie on mutually isolated spectral planes, and it may give one the false impression that Foucault’s Pendulum is itself the life-changing masterpiece that Da Vinci wanted to be. It’s not; while it is full of fascinating ideas and delightfully obscure allusions (including some to Casablanca), the story itself isn’t a whole lot of fun. Unlike Da Vinci, which is admittedly a lot of fun in a guilty way until you step back and realize how stupid it is sometimes, there are no murderous albino henchvillains in sight.

What really shows upon juxtaposition, though, is that Eco is a card-carrying professor of semiotics while Brown doesn’t understand the first thing about signs and interpretation, yet somehow miraculously landed a job teaching kids English. It has allowed me to identify another major irritation about The Da Vinci Code beyond just its abuse of the language, and put this irritation in words. To be succinct, what I mean to say is this: Robert Langdon has no business being a professor of symbology, and even by high school teacher standards, Brown doesn’t have a clue about what it means to read symbolism.

The Da Vinci Code is an exercise in interpreting symbols and mistaking that interpretation for truth. In doing so, it reduces signs and images to correspondent representations that somehow map quite neatly to the things they signify, as if you could look them up in a dime-store book on the twelve uses of dragon’s blood like that taxi-driving kid in Constantine. Eco knows better: his story is one that explicitly makes fun of people who confuse interpretation with the revelation of an absolute reality. In it, Casaubon and Belbo create a reality out of a grand interpretation, which is what signs actually do, only the joke’s on them when it actually works. Symbols don’t just sit around and symbolize things. If Robert Langdon were really a credible symbologist, he would be aware of this. Then again, this is the same book where a professional cryptologist fumbles her way through something as elementary as the Fibonacci sequence, which schoolchildren could probably spot even if they don’t know its name.

And this is why it is so amusing when people mistake The Da Vinci Code as some grand revelation (and sometimes even write books to debunk it lest people be led astray), or when readers on my side of the fence claim the reason they don’t like The Da Vinci Code is because so much of it is made up. Last time I checked, you were allowed to make things up in a work of fiction. The problem with Dan Brown is not that he doesn’t know what truth is, but that he doesn’t even know how to get to truth. In this respect, Foucault’s Pendulum made fun of Dan Brown a decade and a half in advance, only nobody noticed. I venture that most people who pick up Eco’s tome either drown in the stormy sea of allusions or put it down after seeing that it hardly goes anywhere in the first three hundred pages, which is right before it starts its engines and becomes a really good read.

It all comes down to the conception of what conspiracy theories are and how they work. I would say that as is the case in Eco, conspiracies are not the discrete data points, but the connections themselves; moreover, the connections don’t become true by way of logical validity alone. They become true when they are accepted as truth, which, as Fox Mulder says, is out there.

Let’s save V For Vendetta and my completion of the Lemony Snicket series for a future posts. They deserve a space of their own.

On a final tangent, I want to say a few words of praise for a little game for the Nintendo DS called Yoshi’s Touch & Go. It’s phenomenal, and I think Nintendo has stumbled upon the core mechanic for the “stylus platformer” out of all the concepts they first displayed in the mini-games bundled with Super Mario 64 DS. Touch & Go is not the Super Mario Bros. of the touchscreen and certainly no Yoshi’s Island, but that is because instead of real levels, it presents tests of precision, speed and endurance over a randomly iterated course that you play for high scores.

One can only hope that Kirby’s Magic Paintbrush builds on this mechanic and adds to it the element of adventure that comes from meticulous level design. But for now, it’s games like this one that really justify the investment that is the DS and show off what it is capable of, not from a technical perspective, but from an interactive perspective. I also find it encouraging that in spite of how it can pull off N64-quality graphics, the DS still manages to foster traditional 2D design. Viewtiful Joe aside, 2D design has been unfairly neglected by the technically-oriented home console arena.

I also realize I promised in my last post that I would be getting to gushing over the Episode III trailer right away. I’ll get to that.

To answer the question that James Crossman posed in this poll: style beat substance by 92 votes on the sixth ballot. The results are here. If I had any opinion on American politics, I believe the appropriate line would be, “Now I know how the Democrats feel.”

Mustafa Hirji led in the initial rounds of balloting, and it was not until there were three remaining candidates that Lettner surpassed him by a mere three votes, with Abboud dropped as a distant third. While Mustafa’s performance out of the gates surprised everybody present, the trend that ensued as the runoff votes were tabulated was ultimately foreseeable. Steve Smith said it best:

Your assumption seems to be that Mustafa could pick up latter-ballot support. I think that, of all the candidates, he may have the least potential for this. I mean, there are two types of voters: those who know what they’re talking about and those who don’t. The first category is voting Mustafa, probably at a rate of at least 80%. Those in the first category who are not voting Mustafa are most likely failing to do so because they hate democracy, so they’re not going to vote for him on later ballots either.

The voters who don’t know what they’re talking about are generally not voting Mustafa. Those who don’t vote for him on the first ballot are unlikely to do so on later ballots, because their objections to him (“He’s so frowny!” “He isn’t charismatic enough to be President!” “His posters sucked!”) are likely to continue to apply on later ballots. Uninformed voters are much more likely to break for those candidates with nice posters, good sound bytes, and the impression of experience (think Abboud and, to a lesser extent, Lettner and Poon).

The “voters who don’t know what they’re talking about” caught up, and the rest is history.

I will, however, extend a courteous congratulations to our new Students’ Union President, Graham Lettner. This is because I am a good sport when it comes to matters that do not involve Dan Brown, Star Wars franchise novels, fullscreen DVDs or genocide. Lettner’s ascendency is not the beginning of a new dark age for the Students’ Union, but a rejection of the opportunity to escape an existing one. Aside from that, his team ran a strong campaign.

Perhaps there is no need to dwell on the ifs, buts and other miscellaneous conditionals. We could blame Ross Prusakowski for the undue influence of that hopelessly misinformed Gateway piece of his that made the race look close, when frankly, the choice for President was obvious. We could harp on how Mustafa could have gotten half of the superstar volunteers working on other campaigns had his candidacy been announced well in advance, or the irony of how he was instrumental in introducing preferential balloting in the first place. But at this stage, that would accomplish nothing. I think the relative silence at the Power Plant upon the announcement of the winning ballot, Lettner’s campaign team aside, was a sufficient testament to what we saw happen tonight.

On the upside, the Health Plan referendum was defeated. You win some, you lose some.

Preferential balloting is a godsend, though it really is a pity that when it was first being implemented over a year ago, Students’ Council didn’t have the basic mathematical common sense to realize that None Of The Above should not be eliminated as if it were any other candidate. However, the dreaded NOTA still has its more symbolic uses, and I see myself putting it ahead of a lot of contenders in this year’s Students’ Union election.

Without further ado, let us proceed to whom I will be selecting to lead next year’s SU and, if we are lucky, fall prey to the occasional nefarious prank.

President: It should be obvious from the title of this post that I endorse Mustafa Hirji. Out of all the candidates, he had the most credibility going into the campaign and the most raw matter coming out of it. He has the ambition to overhaul the SU in such a way that it can vie for long-term results. His breadth of knowledge concerning how the system works is unparalleled amongst his opponents. He has a plan, and he has a clue.

Coming second, third and fourth on my ballot in a permutation I have yet to decide are None Of The Above, Spanky the Wonder Elf and Alex Abboud. None Of The Above has run a strong and convincing campaign for President this year, especially given what most of the contenders ended up offering. Spanky, which only a few days ago I dubbed a joke campaign with an almost inimitable lameness, vindicated himself with a strong Myer Horowitz performance that reminded me of the Myer-only campaign for George W. Bushwhacker two years ago. (The lamest joke campaign this year is actually that of one Graham Lettner, but I’ll get to that.)

As for the rest of the non-Hirji candidates, most of whom have real initiatives but none of whom pose any meaningful change to the system itself, Alex Abboud is clearly the most credible. If we imagined for a moment that Mustafa were not running and I had to choose a status quo President with short-term ideas, Abboud would be the man. It does not surprise me that Wayne Poon’s campaign is all about outreach, student services, computers, and more computers; the frightening similarity to how Orientation tends to depict the SU’s focus cannot be accidental. A valiant effort, but limited in scope; on the other hand, that didn’t stop Mat Brechtel. Then there’s Danny Bennett, who doesn’t seem to know what the Students’ Union even does.

And then there’s Lettner, who has run an incredible campaign full of theatrics… and nothing else. Whether it be videos where he thinks he’s Rick Mercer, or crowd-pleasing wisecracks about Steve Smith Gateway letters at the Myer forum, Lettner has established an indisputable talent for talking a lot and saying absolutely nothing. If the Myer Horowitz were a public speech competition at a CUSID debate tournament, his performance would place. Clearly, he has an awesome campaign manager, and clearly, that campaign manager is working for the wrong guy. But if this is all Lettner has to offer, I have no qualms about putting him last, especially given that Bennett’s going to be out after the first ballot anyhow.

Dear reader – and I say this with the knowledge that this plea of mine is ultimately futile given that my regular audience originates primarily from the already decided hack circle – if you are considering voting Lettner in this election, I implore you to rethink. I implore you to remember that style without substance only goes as far as to get a lot of attention whilst achieving absolutely nothing tangible. Somewhere in a closet there’s a chicken suit that can attest to this.

VP Academic: I endorse None Of The Above, even though it is virtually impossible for Mathieu Johnson to lose an acclamation race given that you can expect uninformed voters to rubber-stamp him through. This was a tough decision. On one hand, Johnson is not incompetent in such a way that electing him will hurt students; on the other, bad posters and an incomprehensible one-point platform concerning Faculty Associations just don’t cut it. I think we can do better.

VP External: I would endorse Sara Katz, but she pulled out before campaigning started. It should send a message that I would endorse her without having even seen a platform. This is because the choice before me is either a rank incompetent who knows almost as little about his portfolio as Danny Bennett, or a woman full of knowledge, experience and ideas with whom I disagree about almost everything on a basic philosophical level and has a history of pushing the overly adversarial activism that the SU would do well to perform in moderation at most. In either case, I hope for a strong President to guide the VPX in the right direction next year, and that President is Mustafa Hirji. I am putting None Of The Above first, but given how it will likely be eliminated on the first ballot, I will err on the side of competence and begrudgingly endorse Samantha Power as my second pick. I cannot justify giving Tim Smith the dignity of anything higher than third.

VP Operations/Finance: Never mind that Jason Tobias is running uncontested – he’s proven himself to be a worthy candidate for this position, opposed or not. I wholeheartedly support him for this position with little further deliberation.

VP Student Life: Because Wayne Poon is running for President instead of here where he belongs, I am voting for Justin Kehoe without hesitation. He has the background, vision and enthusiasm to bring some life into what is rightly generally considered the odd man out of the five Executive positions. Carolyn Nowry can try again when she has those same traits at her disposal; unlike Smith and Bennett, she is a credible candidate who has done her homework, but she has the misfortune of running against a much better one.

Board of Governors Representative: Roman Kotovych is a hard double-act to follow, and neither of the candidates do the trick. However, both of them are competent and knowledgeable in their own ways, and this is not a race worth weeping about should I not get my way. That said, my vote is going to Shawna Pandya. As much as I admire Adam Cook’s record and what he brings to the Board, so much that I endorsed him for President last year, it worries me that the best reason he can come up with to vote for him over Shawna is that he’s better at “schmoozing”. While his performance as a coherent orator in this year’s campaign is a tremendous improvement on his implosion back in his Presidential run, this just isn’t good enough.

Health Plan Referendum: I will be voting No, thanks to the overwhelming evidence that the Health Plan basically amounts to paying a lot of money for nothing, and potentially paying more than that with each successive year. I’m frankly amazed that such a bad idea made it this far, but the blame for that lies squarely on an ineffective Students’ Council that lacked the sense to defeat it from the start.

The best moment of the Myer Horowitz forum, for those keeping score, was Chris Jones’ question to the Yes side of the referendum, which was something along the lines of: “Do you not agree that the alternative of catastrophic insurance coverage is better than your unsustainable, unaffordable, and unnecessary health plan?” Naturally, it was dodged.

Overall, I must agree with the prevalent sentiments that this year’s campaigns turned out to be terribly mediocre and didn’t live up to the expectations of the original candidates’ announcement – which, given fiascos like Johnson’s late entry in the VPA race, was already not that high a bar. But on Wednesday and Thursday, you still have a chance to draw something good from the experience and, metaphorically speaking, save Christmas. How? Vote Hirji.

As of this morning, it’s official: the formerly biennial National Scrabble Championship will now be held every year, effective immediately. This year, it’s being held in Reno, Nevada on 19-24 August; the main event has been shortened back to 28 games (New Orleans had 30), with a televised Division 1 final presumably subject to all the same ESPN regulations as usual. If I were to enter, I would be facing a similar field of competition as last year due to minimal fluctuation in my rating (albeit a slight recovery), though I wonder what turnout will be like on such relatively short notice.

15 March is going to be a very expensive day. Coming to the Nintendo DS is Yoshi’s Touch & Go, an intriguing side-scroller played entirely with the stylus. Then there’s Donkey Kong Jungle Beat for the GameCube, an even more intriguing side-scroller played entirely with a pair of bongo drums. Coming to DVD are The Incredibles and Series V and VI of Red Dwarf. Although many rightly consider the third and fourth seasons to be the pinnacle of the series, these seasons are not without their classic, must-have episodes; “Gunmen of the Apocalypse” in particular remains one of my favourites. After he left the show, Rob Grant worked a lot of the material in “Gunmen” into Backwards, singularly the best and most readable of the four spinoff novels – and that’s coming from someone on record as, on principle, one who dislikes spinoff novels. When it comes to the likes of Star Wars, “dislike” may even be a tad kind… but that’s a discussion for another day.

In general, all last-ditch campaigns to save cancelled television shows are futile experiments that would get ignored if they were ever noticed in the first place. I must say, though, that Enterprise fans are putting up an admirable fight; when they offer private donations in the million range, you know they’re serious.

I have yet to attend a single election forum, but Chris Samuel harnessed the power of wireless networking to deliver a live report from SUB Stage earlier today. On another note, next year’s candidates already have a hard act to follow: I find it hardly conceivable that someone could possibly run a joke campaign lamer than the pathetic showing put on by Spanky the Wonder Elf.

Finally, while I am reluctant to post endorsements until after the Myer Horowitz, consider me a decided voter. This is going to be a close race in statistics only; as early as it seems, I feel sufficiently informed to make a clear and possibly unwavering choice in every race. Stay tuned for the rationale; in the meantime, rest assured that posters were not the sole consideration.

The vast majority of this weblog’s regular readership is well aware of this by now, but let us all pause for a moment and reflect.

M. Mustafa Hirji is running for Students’ Union President.

I generally don’t like to prejudge campaigns before I see some solid policy documents, forum performances and awesome posters, let alone even hint at endorsing them, but… are we geeking out yet?

Hirji, Katz, Tobias – pigs are fluttering in the friendly skies as we speak.

Also, Sparky the Wonder Elf had better put on a good campaign. We didn’t see this in action last year when preferential balloting was introduced, but theoretically, joke candidates are the biggest winners under that system. There need not be concerns that voting for a joke candidate is at the expense of one whom you actually support.

On a more serious note, the absence of VP Academic candidates at the time of the nomination deadline earlier today is serious cause for concern. In the right hands, it is easily the position that matters most to students. (And by that, I mean real students; you know, those in empirically observable positive states of being that cannot be squared to produce a negative value.) Perhaps the responsibility that the portfolio entails is somewhat of a deterrent. Hopefully this situation sees some quick and efficacious rectification.

In other news, congratulations to Jen Smith, who is now the incoming VP External of the University of Calgary Students’ Union. However, might I recommend that next year, Calgary’s candidates do something about their egregiously backwards poster culture? Toilet-papering with the gentle assistance of permanent markers is an aesthetic that went out of style years ago.

If you live in the Gateway circulation area, make sure you’ve picked up today’s issue. It’s a keeper. How often is it that Students’ Council makes a front-page headline, let alone two in a row? You’ve got a story following the Knisely incident up to the failed motion to reappoint him on Tuesday night – and on the very same page, in full colour, what is possibly the last word on Jung-Suk Ryu, given that the Defeat Jung-Suk blog has had its fill.

Opening up the paper now, on Page 5 we see a story off the CUP wire about the University of Manitoba Students’ Council doing the very antithesis of what U of A’s Council strived so hard for last year: adding seats for interest groups. If we did the same over here, it would rightly be considered regressive. Others disagree, but let’s not get started on why Hudema, Sharma and others are wrong, dead wrong, every time they breathe a word about affirmative action.

It’s funny to see how the student political scene at different Canadian campuses undergo independent ideological shifts in rotating cycles. Observe Slate-Smasher Spencer Keys from the province immediately to my west, who signaled the collapse of the slate system that had previously dominated the Alma-Mater Society. Here at the U of A there remain provisions for candidates to run on slates in SU elections – there is no explicit prohibition – but nobody has taken advantage of it in at least two years. Analogously, the ever-so-oddly Smith-driven political climate that has cultured like a bacterial colony in the agar of University Hall has veered towards an increasingly abstract implementation of democratic ideals, particularly as they pertain to the relationship between representatives and constituents.

And that brings us to David Berry’s Opinion piece on Page 9, the obligatory Knisely editorial. He discusses little of the controversy itself, choosing instead to focus on what consequences one must face as a relatively public figure subject to public scrutiny. On Knisely’s behaviour itself, the most direct response is in the form of a letter on Page 6 by Arts student Danielle Sinnette. She’s not impressed.

I propose that from now on, when it comes to an individual’s sensitivity and whether or not it has actually been subject to harm, we use the Mike Winters Litmus Test.

But I digress. Let us instead return to what I said earlier about the political climate at the Students’ Council we have here. When it comes to tampering with the Council roster, be it by appointment or ejection – we hates it, my precious. This has led to some very silly things like the removal of attendance requirements in their entirety, but has in general been an agreeable philosophy. One will remember that the term I sat on Council, I was emphatically in favour of removing the Residence Halls Association seat in spite of living in residence, and for many of the same reasons that are cited against appointments: the constituents should be in control.

I do think, however, that there does exist an exceptional case where an appointment should go through – and that would be when such an appointment is corrective. This is why Council should have reappointed Knisely in spite of the general belief that “appointments are bad.”

I say that this would be a corrective measure because the Speaker’s decision to refuse Knisely’s rescindment of his own resignation was totally and objectively wrong.

Ignore what Knisely said or did for a moment. Procedurally, what happened was that he sent in his resignation. He then reconsidered and asked to rescind it. He was refused on the grounds of this excerpt from Robert’s Rules (7 October Agenda, Page 9):

The motions to Rescind and to Amend Something Previously Adopted are not in order under the following circumstances:

…

c) When a resignation has been acted upon, or a person has been elected to or expelled from membership or office, and the person was present or has been officially notified of the action.

At the time of his request for rescindment, the resignation had not gone through Council as a motion. It had not been presented to Council or confirmed as part of the Speaker’s Business. It was not, therefore, “something previously adopted.”

There is no conceivable way that anyone who understands the Queen’s English could interpret the resignation as “acted upon” at the time the rescindment was considered. Harlow is wrong, QED.

In this scenario, the appointment would hardly be undemocratic, since Knisely was elected in the March ballot. And Knisely may have resigned of his own volition, but he also pulled that resignation of his own free will. If his constituents were as disgusted by his actions as Ms. Sinnette was in her letter to The Gateway, they could have later removed him by petition, as Council so often proposes when it comes to truancy.

And that’s all I’ll say about that.

As the title of this post suggests, the reason for the lack of updates here over the past week was in part due to the Canadian Thanksgiving. Such negligence could hardly be considered a crime – or even a Crimea, as the case may be – but I do apologize.

Up here in Canada, the Thanksgiving period is not nearly as critical a stakeout for box-office returns as it is in the United States, when you have the annual rollout of the late-November tentpole pictures. As such, all I caught this weekend was Shark Tale, which I may review in full sometime soon, time and effort willing. Unlike Garden State and Napoleon Dynamite, my analyses of which are insofar non-existent, Shark Tale is openly mediocre in ways that make a review of it easier to pull off the shelf.

While on the subject of animation, this year’s Edmonton International Film Festival – which kicks off tomorrow and will run until Tuesday the 19th – includes in its lineup the annual Best of the Ottawa International Animation Festival reel, screening at the Garneau at 11am Saturday and 5pm Monday. Longtime Café Canadien readers will remember just how much I enjoyed last year’s.

I must unfortunately miss most of the Film Festival on account of a debate tournament in Saskatchewan, but I do plan to attend the Monday screening of the Ottawa winners, and will comment accordingly.

Speaking of commenting accordingly, I promised earlier that I would offer something a little more substantive regarding the Adam Knisely issue, but decided instead that it would be best to wait it out until the dust had settled somewhat. Whether or not said dust has indeed settled is open to debate, but my understanding is that Knisely’s resignation went through, and his subsequent rescindment was denied. On Tuesday, there was a motion before Council for his reappointment, which was defeated.

That was the wrong decision, but my reasons for saying so will have to wait.