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Now it can be told: my wife, Wendy Koslow, is the Editor-in-Chief of Top 10 Sources. Congrats, Wendy!

Also on the management team are Halley “Halley’s Comment” Suitt as CEO and Indigo Tabor as Technical Editor-in-Chief.

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What is Top 10 Sources?

Let’s let the site do the talking:

Top 10 Sources is a directory of sites that bring you the freshest,

most relevant content on the Web. We know it’s impossible for anyone to

keep track of the 20 million+ online sources of information. So our

editors search Web 2.0 — blogs, podcasts, wikis, news sites, and every

kind of syndicated sources online — by hand. Our Top 10 lists are

updated frequently as great new sources come online.

Top 10 Sources covers a wide array of topics, assigning an editor to each topic. A topic’s editor will search for what he or she feels are the ten best syndicated sources — that is, sources of information with an RSS feed, such as blogs, new websites and so on — and includes them on the page for that topic. You can visit that topic’s page to keep up with the entries from those ten sources. For the hardcore information junkie, each Top 10 Sources topic has an OPML feed, which makes it easy to add any set of top ten feeds to your aggregator.

If what I just wrote didn’t make any sense, try visiting a Top 10 Sources page to get a feel for what it’s about. Here are some topics you might want to try:

• Alternative Rock
• Dating
• Homeschooling
• Red America
• Blue America
• NBA Basketball

There are all sorts of topics covered in Top 10 Sources, and more are being added all the time — I’ll probably end up contributing to a couple myself. If you’re looking for new sources of information or new blogs to read, Top 10 Sources is a good launching point. Check it out!

Yours Truly!

About a month before the last Canadian Federal Election, Enter Stage Right, a site popular with some of my conservative compatriots in the Canadian blogosphere, ran an article titled Victoria Day and the Life and Death of Traditional Canada. It inspired one of my more popular entries in this blog, the “My Canada Includes Accordion Guy” article, which got a lot of enthusiastic response in the comments and only one hand-wringing “maybe the problem is YOU!” semi-rebuttal from a knee-jerk conservative in another blog’s comments.

The

reason that a lot of us are loath to support the Conservative Party is that

we suspect that they a lot of them don’t like us. It wasn’t that long

ago that it was once the Reform Party.

This was the party of Bob Ringma, who suggested that gays

and “ethnics” could be fired or “moved to the back of the

shop,” if the employer thought that would help business.

We left the Philippines in 1975, not to suckle on the Canadian welfare teat, but because President Ferdinand Marcos

declared martial law and the democratic system was replaced by a

military dictatorship. We left for the same reasons many longer-time

Canadians’ ancestors did: to seek out a better life.

We came

here with skills: Dad’s an obstetrician-gynecologist, Mom’s a

cardiologist and both trained both in the Philippines and in the U.S..

My sister and I were educated here, and she ended up following the

family trade and became a doctor of community medicine and works at the

Peel Region Board of Health.

I’m the “black sheep” of the family

— I have only a bachelor’s degree and went into computer programming.

Even so, my work history speaks for itself: I’ve worked for Mackerel

Interactive Multimedia, one of Canada’s highly-regarded interactive multimedia companies, then one of Canada’s most ambitious dot-coms and finally Tucows, one of Canada’s best-known internet companies.

Simply put: if we took benefits from Canada, we paid them back in spades.

A

favourite bogeyman of Conservative supporters is that immigrants are

often the thin edge of the wedge, sponsoring the rest of the clan for

immigration as soon as they get their citizenship papers. In 31 years

here, the only one in my family who’s ever sponsored someone to

immigrate here is me. I’m sponsoring my wife, who last worked at

Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

We

understand that a wide-open-door policy would be disastrous, but at the

same time, we don’t subscribe to the belief that many Conservative

supporters seem to — that all people who don’t look like descendants

of the Family Compact or Chateau Clique are subhumans out to bleed the country dry.

There’s

lots of common ground shared by immigrants of my ilk and some of

Conservative supporters. Most of us were lucky enough to have parents

who bypassed a lot of North American baby boomer culture and its

extended adolescence, and thus didn’t have to “raise our parents while

raising ourselves” (I suspect that this is the source of a the

wooly-headedness amongst people some of the people who vote for the NDP

by reflex). We come from cultures where hard work is valued, capitalism

isn’t a dirty word and ambition is a virtue. And we do love a Tim Horton’s

double-chocolate donut. It may not be the land of our birth, but it’s

the land we chose to call home, just like your forebears did. Like

them, we hope to leave the place a little better than we found it.

If

the Conservative Party wants my vote, they’ll have to convince me that

they’re not the same as the party from which they grew. They’ll have to

convince me that they’ve moved beyond the “Every since my family came

to Canada, we’ve had nothing but crap from the immigrants” mindset.

I know some Conservative campaigners and supporters who aren’t cut from

the Bob Ringma mold, and with whom I’ve shared a pint of Upper Canada

Dark, so I know that someday, I may be convinced.

Tomorrow is not that day.

Rather than spend $250 at the fundraiser for “Hollywood’s MP”, Sam Bulte, my friend Eldon Brown picked up a vinyl copy of The Trinity Session — the album that made the Cowboy Junkies famous — for $2.50, which represents a 99% savings.

Strangely enough, this is the sort of exercise of the right of first sale that the record industry doesn’t like, especially as more and more music goes digital. After all, they wanted to collect royalties on the sale of used CDs.

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Speaking of the Cowboy Junkies, while searching for images of them, this one came near the top:

…and I couldn’t help but be reminded of this image:

Lives in the Riding

• Jurij Klufas, Conservative Party

  Lives in the riding. Hat tip to Steve Stinson for the update.

• Peggy Nash, New Democratic Party
  Lives in the riding.
• Rob Rischinsky, Green Party
  Lives in the riding.
  
  
• Lorne Gershuny, Marxist-Leninist Party
  I believe he lives in the riding. Can anyone confirm this one?
• Terry Parker, Marijuana Party
  I

  believe that his physical body actually lives within the riding of

  Parkdale-High Park. I wouldn’t hazard a guess as to the location of his

  consciousness. Can anyone confirm either one?

Lives Outside the Riding

• Sam Bulte, Liberal Party
  Her physical body lives in Forest Hill; her soul lives in Hollywood. Here’s

  a map showing the trip from Bloor Street West and High Park Avenue

  (roughly the geographic centre of the riding) to Forest Hill.

[via this discussion on MetaFilter] Perhaps the diagram to the left — The Great British Venn Diagram — will finally end the confusion between the terms “British Isles”, “United Kingdom” and “Great Britain” once and for all.

Two friends of mine, both of whom live in Canada, recently wrote articles about life in different countries. These articles piqued my interest, so I’m pointing you their way.

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Michael “The Darker Side to Rants” Kalus, whom I know from his comments in this blog, email and IM, writes about why he finds the prospect of returning to Germany unappealing:

Germany, after the second world war, really tried repentance and it

succeeded in a way. But I think the price is starting to show. You

don’t realize it when you live in Germany or grow up there, but there

is a deep seated negativity about oneself, about the things that we, as

a nation have done. I think this is seeping even further into it. Hey,

Hitler wanted to create a superior Master Race, so anybody who is

better should not show this, we are just a good group of simple people,

no harm ever came from those, right?

I think that’s the biggest

problem, there is a lot of good things in Germany but Germany is really

building itself into a brick wall. Looking back now to my own school

time and work there I come to realize it.

I did realize a

different attitude when I moved to Canada, how intelligence is rewarded

not punished (at large), while in Germany everybody just tries to fit

in and “not stick out”.

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Ashley Bristowe, with whom I went to Crazy Go Nuts University and have known for nearly 15 years, writes about her experiences in my home country, the Philippines. I may have lived in the Philippines longer than her, but not by much, and not as an adult.

Now,

let it be said that the Philippines is perhaps physically the most

beautiful country I’ve ever visited. Volcanos, beaches, rice terraces,

rainforest, seascapes and hilltops, misty mountains and steaming flat

plains… the quality of light is incredible. It is rich in natural

resources, and it’s been said by more knowledgeable Asiaphiles than me

that if the Philippines ever got its shit together (i.e. elected

officials of an ilk different than the

stream-of-nightmare-consciousness thieves and bandits they’ve elected

for generations who’ve used the national treasury as a personal slush

fund… anyone else, how ’bout?), it could take enormous advantage of

the fact that it’s the only large English-speaking country in Asia.

Could capitalize on its relationship with the United States to push for

preferential trade relations. Could host UN agencies, multinational

corporations, and NGO headquarters. Could supply translators and

executives to the whole region. It’s a shame, really, the wasted

potential and all the grab-the-money-and-run consequences of poor

government and brain drain: urban decay, traffic like nowhere else on

earth, the worst air quality I’ve ever experienced (and I’ve lived in

Delhi), bureaucratic corruption and paralysis. It’s tragic.

And

every born-and-raised-in-the-Philippines-Filipino I’ve ever met outside

the Philippines has a tragic story. I mean, we all have tragic stories.

But they’ll tell you their tragic story inside of five minutes of the

first hello, I guess is the difference. The culture of

immigration-into-servitude among lower-middle class Filipinos has

created a kind of widespread normalization of long-term seperation of

parents from children, wives from husbands, families from clan, that

I’ve never been able to fully wrap my head around. It is not in any way

unusual to meet Filipinas who have spouses, children, families, houses,

jobs, and whole lives waiting for them in stasis back in the

Philippines – while they toil away as domestics, nannies, and

entertainers, in isolation and obscurity and at very low rates of pay,

in Hong Kong condos and Dubai highrise compounds and faceless Canadian

suburbs. There is this “what can I do? I must do this…” flap of the hands, sorrowful upturning of the face, when you talk to them about their situation. Why

are you so far from your family? Don’t you miss them? Isn’t there

ANYTHING you could do back home? When are you going to see your

children again? Don’t know, bahala na. By no means are

Filipinos alone in being migrant workers working terrible jobs far from

home and sending remittances back to keep the family afloat, I do

realize this. It happens all over the world. I think it’s these

Filipinos’ incomparable propensity to communicate the difficulty of

their circumstances, and somehow plead for assistance while seeming

entirely unable to act on their own behalf, that really gets to me.

I’ve highlighted the Tagalog phrase bahala na above, because I think it’s a telling indicator of the Philippines’ number one problem. It’s a Filipino expression that’s kind of hard to translate — think of it like the Arabic word en’shallah, or perhaps the English expression “whatever” when used as a Gen-X dismissal. Perhaps P.J. O’Rourke’s translation of bahala na in his book Holidays in Hell is the most apt: he interpreted it as “You must have me mistaken for someone who gives a shit.”

Bonus reading: Get Real Philippines, a site that points out what’s wrong with the Philippines and what can be done about it.

Those of you who weren’t teenagers in the 1980s may not remember the image to the right. Back then, the technology that the entertainment industry feared was good old magnetic tape. The industrial-entertainment complex’s movie arm was fighting the Betamax; MPAA capo Jack Valenti famously testified before Congress that “the VCR is to the American film producer and the American

public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone”. In the end, Hollywood discovered that the new rental market opened by videotape technology was a gold mine.

Meanwhile, the music industry was fighting the tape battle on two fronts: home taping on analog cassettes whose fidelity would be considered laughable today, and the possible threat of DAT — digital audio tape. They insisted that the mix tapes that I made for girls I like were threatening the livelihoods of Depeche Mode and The Smiths, while they were running ads in musicians’ magazines screaming that DAT was the devil. Before I became the Accordion Guy, I was a synth guy, and I remember reading two-page centrefold ads in Keyboard magazine with large headlines that read “Don’t let them do DAT!”

As with videotapes, we know what happened with audiotape: home taping did not destroy the music industry, which grew in leaps and bounds as the music scene grew. While DAT as a medium never made it big in the consumer market, the underlying technology — digital music  — did.

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The fundraiser for Sam Bulte being held tonight at the Drake Hotel will feature a performance by Margo Timmins. You may remember her band, The Cowboy Junkies, best known for their album, The Trinity Session. Recorded on a single microphone in the Church of the Holy Trinity for $250 (ironically, that’s the per-plate price of admission to the fundraising dinner at which Margo is performing tonight), this album was originally released on a small label and got its buzz based on word-of-mouth and thousands of mix tapes that teenagers — myself included — made for each other.
 
Back then, one way to declare your love (or at least infatuation) for a girl or guy was to make a “mix tape” of songs for her or him. If you were particularly creative, you’d embellish the tape with an artistic J-card (that’s the cardboard liner that went into the cassette case — here’s an example). The important thing about a mix tape was that it let you say things that it provided a kind of indirection — a way of saying things that you might not otherwise be able to say in a face-to-face conversation (instant messaging may be like that today).

I remember making mix tapes for girls I liked back at Crazy Go Nuts University. Like any guy who’d begun to figure out women even a little bit, I knew to include Sweet Jane from The Trinity Session on those tapes. I’d be willing to bet that the real marketing for The Trinity Session wasn’t done by the record company, but by tens of thousands of people like me, making mix tapes as a form of courting and for make-out mood music. Therein lies the irony of Ms. Timmins performing at tonight’s fundraiser: the viral marketing that made her big back then (and that’s also helping pull them out of the “where are they now?” file) is precisely the sort of thing that the people backing this fundraiser are trying to kill with the help of Ms. Bulte.

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A copule of musical gifts for you: this page on Pastestore.com features Waltz Across America, the Cowboy Junkies’ 2000 live album. It offers two free MP3s from the album: Sweet Jane and Misguided Angel (somewhat apropos), both songs that first appeared in The Trinity Session.

Here’s another goodie — Mixed Messages, a comic from the old dot-com era site Breakup Girl. Breakup Girl was an romantic advice-dispensing superhero, and in this adventure, she helps a guy tap the power of the mix tape.